Abstract
In order to computationally study design cognition under design process management, this work utilizes a topic modeling approach to analyze design team discourse during problem-solving. The particular experimental design, from previous work by the authors, places one of the design team conditions under the guidance of a human process manager. In that work, teams under this guidance outperformed the unmanaged teams in terms of their design solutions. This opens the opportunity to not only model design discourse during problem solving, but also explore the impact of process manager interventions and their impact on design cognition. Utilizing this approach, a topic model is trained on discourse of human designers, for both managed and unmanaged teams, collaboratively solving a design problem. Results show that the two team conditions significantly differ in a number of the extracted topics, and in particular, those topics that most pertain to the manager interventions. Furthermore, a before and after analysis of the topic-motivated interventions, reveals that the process manager interventions significantly shift the topic mixture of the team members’ discourse toward that of the interventions immediately after they are provided. Together, these results not only corroborate the effect of the process manager interventions on design team discourse and cognition, but provide promise in the computational detection and facilitation of design interventions based on real-time discourse data.
