Applying Social Network Analysis to Design Process Research, a Case Study

This paper presents a novel approach to analyse design project development demonstrated within a collaborative design case study. We present the limitations of the existing protocol-based design process analysis in analysing real design scenarios. Taking a complete set of regular meeting notes from a design project, the study translated the record of design discussions and decisions into a decision network. We then selected three Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods to apply to the network to analyse different aspects of the project development. Degree, betweenness and clustering focused on three different resolutions of the design process, offered quantitative ways to analysis and visualise the design decisions in both short term as well as over the whole design process.