Design Process Communication Methodology: Improving the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Collaboration, Sharing, and Understanding

Abstract

Designers struggle to (1) collaborate within projects, (2) share processes across projects, and (3) understand processes across the firm or industry. Overcoming each challenge requires communication of design processes. This paper aggregates concepts from organizational science, human-computer interaction, and process modeling fields to develop the design process communication methodology (DPCM). The DPCM consists of elements that represent and contextualize processes and methods that enable designers to capture and use the processes. These elements and methods enable a methodology that is computable, embedded, modular, personalized, scalable, shared, social, and transparent. The authors operationalize the DPCM via the process integration platform, a cloud-based process communication application where individuals exchange and organize files as nodes in information dependency maps. This paper provides evidence of the DPCM’s testability and proposes metrics for evaluating the DPCM’s effectiveness and efficiency in communicating design processes. The DPCM lays the foundation for commercial software that shifts focus away from incremental and fragmented process improvement toward a platform that nurtures emergence of (1) improved multidisciplinary collaboration, (2) process knowledge sharing, and (3) innovation-enabling understanding of existing processes.