Collaborative Research: Improving Interdisciplinary Design Teamwork and Communication Using Boundary Negotiating Artifacts

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The importance of interdisciplinary teamwork skills for engineering graduates is widely recognized, and increased interdisciplinary collaboration is needed to solve the grand challenges facing society today. Although research from other fields has demonstrated the value of examining the artifacts generated during research and design, there are as yet no ethnographic studies of the day-to-day practices of interdisciplinary teams in engineering education settings and the objects they create and use in those practices. Therefore, this study is significant because it fundamentally advances knowledge of interdisciplinary teamwork by developing a typology of boundary negotiating artifacts (BNAs) in interdisciplinary engineering teams. BNAs are artifacts and practices surrounding them that coordinate perspectives, create alignment between team members from different disciplines, facilitate transmission of information, and allow team members to learn from other disciplines during research and design. The project addresses a significant gap in knowledge about the actual practices and artifacts generated during the course of interdisciplinary design projects. By focusing on the daily, micro-level practices of engineers, a fuller, more accurate description of communication processes emerges than those based on interviews and normative descriptions of engineering work. Characterizing the artifacts that facilitate or hinder collaboration ultimately contributes to engineers' abilities to work with stakeholders from other backgrounds as successful boundary-spanners. This study's contribution is significant because it provides the first research-based educational materials that are designed to improve interdisciplinary design teamwork and communication through the use of an artifacts typology. The goals of this project are: 1) to characterize the ways in which use and non-use of artifacts facilitates and hinders interdisciplinary teamwork and communication, 2) to develop a typology of models of artifacts created and utilized in interdisciplinary teams, and 3) to design, implement, and assess explicit incorporation of BNAs into interdisciplinary engineering courses at Washington State University and Oregon State University. Understanding the roles and uses of artifacts in interdisciplinary communication requires collecting data through long term, ethnographically-informed methods. Participant observers are collecting ethnographic data from several interdisciplinary design projects. Ethnographic data include observations and interviews with students and faculty members. Based on results from the ethnographic data, a typology of BNAs and their uses is being developed. Organizing the data in this manner allows other researchers and instructors access into the project's findings. Utilizing results of the research, BNAs are being strategically incorporated into engineering curricula to optimize their use and effectiveness. Together, these outcomes build a vital and solid foundation for future research on interdisciplinary communication processes and associated improvement of interdisciplinary design courses.