Abstract
Design team meetings are assumed to provide a creative forum in which designers can interactively shape new product ideas. However, the collaborative processes that take place within these meetings are poorly understood, and this presents an obstacle to the development of new technologies for sup- porting interactive design. We report a study in which video recordings of small teams of final-year engineering design students working on realistic design consultancy briefs were analyzed into event sequences and coded for type of design reasoning (visual, nonvisual), drawing space activity (sketching, pointing, and figural gesturing), and conversational grounding (the exchange of positive evidence of mutual understanding). Using exploratory sequential data analysis techniques, 2 interactional patterns were found to differentiate visual and nonvisual design sequences: (a) visual sequences were longer and less interactive than nonvisual sequences, often comprising uninterrupted bursts of design ideas from single individuals; (b) conversational grounding in visual design sequences was typically initiated by the speaker, but by the listener in nonvisual sequences. These results suggest that the management of conversational turn-taking differs in the 2 types of design sequence, and we assess the implications of this for the design of "seamless" collaboration media.
