Visualising the social dynamics of team collaboration

Abstract

The aim of this research is to develop automated computational methods that visualise a particular social dimension of teamwork, the mutual expectations and shared knowledge that form the basis for effective collaborative work, to better facilitate its accurate analysis and interpretation. This teamwork dimension is operationalised as conceptual coherence, which is imputed from the semantic coherence of team communication. This paper presents three different information visualisation techniques for representing the social dynamics of design team collaboration based on the content of their communication. This collection of data representations was developed using a custom-made software toolkit that merges computational linguistic and information visualisation algorithms. Based on this research, several teamwork visualisation guidelines have been derived in order to transform the communications of design teams into useful devices for quantifying and representing social accounting metrics concerning the level and quality of their collaborative interactions over time.

Keywords:

• teamwork
• information visualisation
• design collaboration
• visualisation design

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a University of Sydney Early Career Research Grant and an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant DP0557346. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Prof. Petra Badke-Schaub for the transcripts of the Bamberg mechanical engineering design students and for her assistance in interpreting the results.