SGER: Facilitating Effective Communication in Interdisciplinary Design Teams

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This Small Grant for Exploratory Research proposes to investigate the potential for enhancing communication in interdisciplinary design teams through the fundamental understanding of communication ontologies and linguistics between team members. This is a high risk, high potential research activity that brings together faculty with expertise in linguistics, materials science and engineering, english, and industrial engineering, with two industry partners - Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems and Goodyear. The risk involves the research into integrating linguistic discourse analysis with "speech acts" codification for the engineering design process. While such linguistic research has been used effectively in other domains, this is a new attempt to capture the interactions (face-to-face, written and verbal) to be mined from the design team process. The high potential is the significance of the "ontology" tool proposed for conceptual design, where communication patterns modeling and early investigations into optimization methods to determine best scenarios could lead to a theory-based software for all engineering design. The broader impacts also include the interactions with the industries; where Goodyear will support the effort by proving access to design groups, direct participation in interviews and surveys, and validation feedback for the preliminary models. Raytheon will do the same.