Mind over modality? The impact of design representation on shared understanding in collaborative student engineering design

Abstract Collaborative engineering design is increasingly important for modern engineering practices as projects routinely require collaboration across multiple domains. Reaching shared understanding within the team is a critical factor in constructing a successful and enjoyable collaboration. One way to promote shared understanding is through the use of design artifacts and design representations as boundary objects. Different design representations have unique characteristics that benefit the engineering design process but could also hinder the development of shared understanding. It is important to identify the limitations of the design artifacts to select the suitable design artifact for the situation and mitigate potential adverse effects, including design fixation and miscommunication. Despite previous studies’ findings, there are still unsolved questions regarding the exact effect of the modality of the design representations on the development of team-shared understanding. This work examines three types of commonly used design representations in the engineering design community, namely, textual description, hand sketch and engineering CAD model. Their unique effect on the development of shared understanding is investigated in a collaborative engineering design setting. The results indicate that the modality of the design artifact would affect the development of shared understanding, and using visual representations can yield better team outcomes regardless of the modality complexity, mainly for design structures. This work shows the importance of using the proper design representation in collaborative engineering design tasks, and such a finding is a critical and timely reminder in the current age when team interactions constantly involve text-dominant online communications.