Exploring a Multi-Meeting Engineering Design Project

Abstract

This paper reports a case study of a multi-meeting engineering design project lasting 5 months, unlike most design studies that focus on a single meeting. The project involved an engineering consultancy for the design of a robot controller. The design team consisted of engineers with different backgrounds. Eight sequential design meetings were studied using protocol analysis. The video recordings of these meetings were transcribed and then segmented and coded using an ontologically-based coding scheme. The analysis of these meetings focused on differences in the distributions of design issues and syntactic design processes between adjacent meetings. Statistically significant differences between some adjacent meetings were observed, which implies changes in design behavior between those meetings.