Evaluating the performance associated with IDEA FLOWS in industrial design teams

The cooperative relationships among team members are not recorded. This study adopted the idea flow analysis method proposed by Alex “Sandy” Pentland and proposes a mode, denoted as industrial design team idea mode (IDTIM), for analyzing the ideas developed by industrial design teams. Students from a design department at a university were recruited as the research subjects, and these subjects applied two types of discussion mode to execute the experiments. The experiments entailed using a reality mining approach to observe the students’ discussions according to five categories of interaction patterns. The IDTIM was applied for executing analytical tasks. The results are as outlined follows: (1) A team with high cooperation performance developed design works with relatively high quality; (2) interactively evaluating the idea flow and the draft of design concepts generated through team cooperation effectively assisted instructors in instructing student design projects; (3) executing the IDTIM enabled the students to actively express their opinions; (4) visualizing the idea flow information facilitated clearly understanding the perspective of student team cooperation; and (5) using the IDTIM technique assisted instructors in effectively instructing team design projects.