Teamwork in Design Education

Abstract

In the past few decades, there has been an ongoing shift from work organised around individual jobs to team-based structures (Hansen, 2006; Edmondson et al., 2007; Bell et al., 2012). Teams can offer “greater adaptability, productivity, and creativity than any one individual can offer and provide more complex, innovative, and comprehensive solutions to organisational problems” (Salas et al., 2005). Also in design projects, complexity has increased and time to market decreased. Only teamwork allows companies to deal with the required efficiency and the increasing number of parallel activities. As the designers of tomorrow, it is therefore essential for design students to become comfortable with working in teams, and to learn how to effectively work in these teams.

The central aim of this project was to research how design students can learn about teamwork. To answer this research question, an extensive literature review was done on the topics of teamwork, learning, and reflection. Furthermore, empirical research has been conducted, with research methods including interviews, pilot studies, generative sessions, and observation. The majority of the empirical research was conducted at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology.

Literature combined with the findings from the empirical research suggests that students should develop situational awareness and learn to be adaptive in teams. To achieve this, the student should be educated throughout the curriculum on competences and skills in the areas of cooperation, coordination, communication, and self-awareness.

Throughout the project is became clear that reflection was the means to turn teamwork experiences into valuable learning experiences. Various tools that facilitate reflection on teamwork within group design projects were designed and validated. Besides designing effective reflective exercises, two other challenges were identified to achieve meaningful reflection on teamwork: creating an emotionally supportive environment and boosting students’ motivation for doing the reflection.

This project resulted in a product-service system Team Track. Team Track contains of a framework and three corresponding tools. The Team Track framework proposes a setup of a course in which students learn about teamwork, while doing a group design project. The framework can be used by course coordinators to embed teamwork education in their course. The key learning activities proposed by the framework are three facilitated workshops in which the student reflects on teamwork experiences and sets teamwork-related goals for the future. In between the workshop, the student completes modules that offer teamwork theory.

The three Team Track tools support the learning activities proposed by the framework. The Team Bricks are a dynamic and physical representation of the team’s reflections and goals. The team’s personalised Course Calendar contains daily exercises that students have to complete. The online platform has multiple purposes: if offers a database with teamwork theory modules; students have their personal page on which their teamwork-related insights are captured; the student sets teamwork-related goals for himself, which are monitored through the platform.

Finally, the framework and tools have been evaluated with experts on both teamwork and education. However, to fully validate the effectiveness, Team Track should be tested within a real life group design project.