How designers communicate within design teams, and with users, suppliers, and customers, differs in formality both between industries and between different situations within one project. This paper identifies three layers of structure in design communication, each of which can be more or less formal: the design process, the interaction between participants, and the representations of design information that are constructed and used. These layers can be formal across a spectrum from explicit rules to habitual conventions. The paper draws on a range of contrasting case studies in mechanical engineering and knitwear design, as well as a larger corpus of cases comparing design domains more generally, to analyze how formality affects design interaction in different situations and process contexts. Mismatches in the understanding of formality can lead to misunderstandings, in particular across expertise boundaries and between designers and their clients or customers. Formality can be modulated in the mannerism of communication, the rhetoric employed, and how representations are constructed, to make communication more effective. The effort and skill put into modulating formality is greater in domains where designers work with end users, like architecture, than it is in companies where designers interact mainly with other professionals.

Traceability of information provides the basis for assessing the credibility of engineering information, better understanding it, and making judgments about the appropriateness of its use for a particular design task. The presented research attempts to answer how the proposed traceability methodology and framework could help designers to improve communication, eventually create new channels of communication, and contribute to the creation of shared understanding in collaborative design processes. The discussion of these issues is based on a literature review, empirical research, observations of industrial practice, and feedback from initial implementation. The research is focused on information objects (IOs), archetypically represented in the engineering domain as technical documents that are often complex structures constituted of textual, numerical, and graphical fragments. The presented approach is based on an abstraction of IOs' relationships organized around specific contexts that are defined by a subset of product development ontology. Each IO could be repeatedly represented in various contexts that may contain different subsets of objects and their relationships. Such a representation also acts as a container in which the ontology concept instances are associated with IOs being developed and traced during the design episode. The usage of the proposed traceability methodology is discussed with examples of implementation and possible utilization situations. The paper is focused on explaining how the developed functionalities could help to resolve manifestations of inadequate information flow, which cause communication barriers in engineering companies. In addition, the proposed traceability methodology offers the possibility to record the detailed history of actions and events associated with IOs in the usage process of the product life cycle management systems. Based on the research findings, this paper argues that such a network of the traceability links and relationships may be viewed as a novel design communication channel.

In this paper we explore the influence of the physical and social environment (the design space) son the formation of shared understanding in multidisciplinary design teams. We concentrate on the creative design meeting as a microenvironment for studying processes of design communication. Our applied research context entails the design of mixed physical–digital interactive systems supporting design meetings. Informed by theories of embodiment that have recently gained interest in cognitive science, we focus on the role of interactive “traces,” representational artifacts both created and used by participants as scaffolds for creating shared understanding. Our research through design approach resulted in two prototypes that form two concrete proposals of how the environment may scaffold shared understanding in design meetings. In several user studies we observed users working with our systems in natural contexts. Our analysis reveals how an ensemble of ongoing social as well as physical interactions, scaffolded by the interactive environment, grounds the formation of shared understanding in teams. We discuss implications for designing collaborative tools and for design communication theory in general.

This paper relates key concepts of strategic cognition in microstrategy to design practice. It considers the potential roles of designers' output in strategic sensemaking and sensegiving. Designed artifacts play well-known roles as communication media; sketches, renderings, models, and prototypes are created to explore and test possibilities and to communicate these options within and outside the design team. This article draws on design and strategy literature to propose that designed artifacts can and do play a role as symbolic communication resources in sensemaking and sensegiving activities that impact strategic decision making and change. Extracts from interviews with three designers serve as illustrative examples. This article is a call for further empirical exploration of such a complex subject.

In human-centered design, user research drives design decisions by providing an understanding of end users. In practice, different people, teams, or even companies manage each step of the design process, making communication of user research results a critical activity. Based on an empirical study of current methods used by experts, this paper presents strategies for effectively communicating user research findings across organizational or corporate boundaries. To build researcher–client relationships, understand both user and client needs, and overcome institutional inertia, this paper proposes viewing user research clients as users of user research outcomes. This reframing of the crafting of communication across boundaries as a parallel internal human-centered design process we refer to as a double ethnography.

Communication is both the problem and the solution to misunderstanding. It is the human communicative ability to display understanding to resolve misunderstandings that plays an important part in the organization of the design inputs to a construction project. Ambiguity and uncertainty, as different forms of misunderstanding, are studied in this article, as they are manifest in the conversation at a design meeting. In this setting the coordination of both in situ design activities and the planning of design tasks takes place in real time, in conversation. Exhibited are several ways that design ambiguities and uncertainties can be seen in the interactional details of a multidisciplinary design team's conversation, to then report on how different design expertise featured in the raising of, and attempts at resolving, the misunderstandings that arose. In the course of this meeting, ambiguity and uncertainty were observed not as neat, discrete phenomena but were interwoven in the conversation. This characteristic poses difficulties in the disambiguation of the problem-solving response to each form of misunderstanding and further develops our understanding of design as it is communicated and conducted in social interaction. Finally, some implications from this study are put forward to inform the design of support for collaborative design.

This paper discusses the effects of direct and indirect communications on social learning and task coordination in design teams. The findings reported in this paper are based on a computational model that simulates the formation of transactive memory (TM) through social learning from direct and indirect communications. Direct communications are explicit information exchanged between team members whereas indirect communication may be opportunistic and coincidental, resulting in learning and information gained through observations of the actions of others. However, team structure mediates opportunities for communication. Three types of team structures are studied, which are differentiated on the basis of their constraints on and opportunities for direct and indirect communications across the team. The differences across the team structures are investigated through a series of simulations in which team member retention, cognitive busyness of team members, and task complexity are additional moderating variables, and task coordination and formation of TM are the dependent variables. Fewer communications to coordinate the same tasks are taken as the measure of efficient task coordination. Findings suggest that reduction in communication and learning opportunities are more detrimental to the task coordination in flat teams as compared to functional teams. Indirect communications contribute more to the formation of TM than to task coordination. Flat teams facilitate the formation of TM, whereas functional teams are more appropriate for efficient task coordination, indicating that the role of TM in mediating task coordination varies with team structure.