Collaborative Design Knowledge Construction and Measuring Shared Understanding

This paper describes a pilot test conducted as part of the ongoing research project. The performed pilot test describes the collaborative knowledge construction under two conditions: i) Collaborative knowledge construction in a traditional brainstorm setting ii) Collaborative knowledge construction in a proposed method (section number) described further in the paper. The pilot test focuses on measuring the shared mental model of a multi-disciplinary design team involved in a problem solving session. The approach to the study to predict shared understanding was to measure overlapping of mental models on a set of concept construct pairs of individuals during the design session. The findings of the pilot test were that the shared understanding in the proposed condition was better compared to the traditional means of brain storming.