Team Learning, Development, and Adaptation

[Excerpt] Our purpose is to explore conceptually these themes centered on team learning, development, and adaptation. We note at the onset that this chapter is not a comprehensive review of the literature. Indeed, solid conceptual and empirical work on these themes are sparse relative to the vast amount of work on team effectiveness more generally, and therefore a thematic set of topics that are ripe for conceptual development and integration. We draw on an ongoing stream of theory development and research in these areas to integrate and sculpt a distinct perspective on team learning, development, and adaptation

Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Science, Engineering, and Public Policy

Progress in many domains increasingly benefits from our ability to view the systems through a computational lens, i.e., using computational abstractions of the domains; and our ability to acquire, share, integrate, and analyze disparate types of data. These advances would not be possible without the advanced data and computational cyberinfrastructure and tools for data capture, integration, analysis, modeling, and simulation. However, despite, and perhaps because of, advances in "big data" technologies for data acquisition, management and analytics, the other largely manual, and labor-intensive aspects of the decision making process, e.g., formulating questions, designing studies, organizing, curating, connecting, correlating and integrating crossdomain data, drawing inferences and interpreting results, have become the rate-limiting steps to progress. Advancing the capability and capacity for evidence-based improvements in science, engineering, and public policy requires support for (1) computational abstractions of the relevant domains coupled with computational methods and tools for their analysis, synthesis, simulation, visualization, sharing, and integration; (2) cognitive tools that leverage and extend the reach of human intellect, and partner with humans on all aspects of the activity; (3) nimble and trustworthy data cyber-infrastructures that connect, manage a variety of instruments, multiple interrelated data types and associated metadata, data representations, processes, protocols and workflows; and enforce applicable security and data access and use policies; and (4) organizational and social structures and processes for collaborative and coordinated activity across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.Comment: A Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper, 9 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1604.0200

Facilitating creativity in interdisciplinary design teams using cognitive processes: A review

Interdisciplinary, or cross-functional, teams have become quite common for engineering and design. Many of today’s scientific breakthroughs occur in interdisciplinary teams, as the increasingly complex problems facing society often cannot be addressed by single disciplines alone. However, fostering creative and productive collaboration in interdisciplinary teams is no easy challenge. First, leading creative teamwork is difficult by itself. Second, many of the factors that impede teams and teamwork in general are exacerbated in interdisciplinary teams as a result of differences between team members. In this paper, we will review the team creativity psychology and management literature, and discuss how cognitive processes that facilitate creativity can be used by engineering and design teams. Specifically, past research has shown problem construction that allows teams to develop a structure to guide solving ambiguous problems. Further, problem construction allows teams to develop a shared understanding of the problem which aids in later processes. While there is significant research on idea generation, results suggest that teams may not be better at this than individuals. In this review, we discuss how idea generation in teams can mitigate some of the issues that lead to this effect. Finally, team research has only recently began to determine what factors influence idea evaluation and selection for implementation

Team Learning: A Theoretical Integration and Review

With the increasing emphasis on work teams as the primary architecture of organizational structure, scholars have begun to focus attention on team learning, the processes that support it, and the important outcomes that depend on it. Although the literature addressing learning in teams is broad, it is also messy and fraught with conceptual confusion. This chapter presents a theoretical integration and review. The goal is to organize theory and research on team learning, identify actionable frameworks and findings, and emphasize promising targets for future research. We emphasize three theoretical foci in our examination of team learning, treating it as multilevel (individual and team, not individual or team), dynamic (iterative and progressive; a process not an outcome), and emergent (outcomes of team learning can manifest in different ways over time). The integrative theoretical heuristic distinguishes team learning process theories, supporting emergent states, team knowledge representations, and respective influences on team performance and effectiveness. Promising directions for theory development and research are discussed

Transdisciplinarity seen through Information, Communication, Computation, (Inter-)Action and Cognition

Similar to oil that acted as a basic raw material and key driving force of industrial society, information acts as a raw material and principal mover of knowledge society in the knowledge production, propagation and application. New developments in information processing and information communication technologies allow increasingly complex and accurate descriptions, representations and models, which are often multi-parameter, multi-perspective, multi-level and multidimensional. This leads to the necessity of collaborative work between different domains with corresponding specialist competences, sciences and research traditions. We present several major transdisciplinary unification projects for information and knowledge, which proceed on the descriptive, logical and the level of generative mechanisms. Parallel process of boundary crossing and transdisciplinary activity is going on in the applied domains. Technological artifacts are becoming increasingly complex and their design is strongly user-centered, which brings in not only the function and various technological qualities but also other aspects including esthetic, user experience, ethics and sustainability with social and environmental dimensions. When integrating knowledge from a variety of fields, with contributions from different groups of stakeholders, numerous challenges are met in establishing common view and common course of action. In this context, information is our environment, and informational ecology determines both epistemology and spaces for action. We present some insights into the current state of the art of transdisciplinary theory and practice of information studies and informatics. We depict different facets of transdisciplinarity as we see it from our different research fields that include information studies, computability, human-computer interaction, multi-operating-systems environments and philosophy.Comment: Chapter in a forthcoming book: Information Studies and the Quest for Transdisciplinarity - Forthcoming book in World Scientific. Mark Burgin and Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Editor

Enhancing Innovation Through Biologically Inspired Design

Mixing upper level undergraduates majoring in engineering with those majoring in biology, we have devised a course on biologically-inspired design (BID) that provides practical training in methods and techniques that facilitate the identification and translation of biological principles into solutions for human challenges. The challenges of interdisciplinary courses generally, and the specific challenges of fostering exchange among biologists and engineers lead us to define these learning goals: (1) basic knowledge of successful examples of BID, (2) interdisciplinary communication skills, (3) knowledge about domains outside of their core training, (4) a uniquely interdisciplinary design process, and (5) how to apply existing technical knowledge to a new discipline. We developed the following course components to meet the key learning objectives: BID Lectures; Design Lectures; Found object exercises; Quantitative assessments; Analogy exercises; Research assignments; Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Mentorship; Idea Journals and Reflections. We will provide an extensive description of these elements, which we have chosen to incorporate based on our own experience with interdisciplinary communication, as well as findings from cognitive science regarding how students actually learn. This 15 week course is organized using assignments of increasing complexity that allow students to learn and apply essential skills of BID methodology and practice. Early exercises, which combine lectures, group discussions and individual assignments, have these objectives: 1) allow students to develop the necessary inter-disciplinary communication and research skills to facilitate their design project work; 2) expose students to ideation and design skills that will encourage them to work outside of their comfort zone; 3) practice the analogical reasoning skills that facilitate the successful search for and application of relevant biological concepts. This initial portion of the course stresses that BID occurs at the early phase of a design process and that identifying solutions from the biological domain requires that students have a sufficient breakdown of their problem combined with sufficient biological knowledge to suggest appropriate mappings between problem and solution. Two primary barriers are a lack of appreciation for how the evolutionary “design” process differs from human design, and the use of different terminology for describing similar processes in biology vs. engineering. We describe some teaching practices and activities that allow students to overcome these difficulties. The course culminates in a group project, which is a detailed conceptual design including a preliminary analysis of expected performance, value, and feasibility. A unique feature of the course is that it represents the efforts of not only biologists and engineers, but also contributions from cognitive scientists engaged in understanding human cognition and creativity. Our course strategy has been deeply influenced by findings in that field. We have studied the activity of classroom participants for the last three years, examining the processes they use, and intermediate and final design representations. Analysis of this has yielded a number of observations about the cognitive process of biologically inspired design that may provide insights regarding how to enhance BID education, as well as provide useful insight for professionals in the design field. Key words: biologically-inspired design (BID); interdisciplinary communicatio

Interdisciplinary process driven performative morphologies: A morphogenomic approach towards developing context aware spatial formations

Architectural praxis is in continuous state of change. The introduction of information technology driven design techniques, constantly updating building information modeling protocols, new policy demands coupled together with environmental regulations and cultural fluctuations are all open-ended dynamic phenomena within which contemporary architectural constructs have to efficiently perform. This dynamic meta-context brings about with it a vital thrust on developing digitally driven adaptive design processes and techniques for the production of performative architectural morphologies. Conceiving the built form (at variable scales) as an ambitious exercise in digitally driven bottom-up associative, context driven formations of inter-dependent, ubiquitously communicating spatial components rather than focusing on the development of a top-down form centered approach thus attains a vital interdisciplinary process driven research and design position in the contemporary. This research article exemplifies upon one such novel information integrated, contextual data driven generative design process: Morphogenomics, being experimented with at Hyperbody, TU Delft, under the author’s guidance. Morphogenomics deals with the intricacies of morphological informatics, specifically outlining the relationship between contextual information and its associative linkage with the generation of performative morphology. The research article puts forth a logical underpinning of spatially distributed ubiquitous communication and parametric computational frameworks by means of two research cases: a. The development of Performative Skin systems (at a component scale) b. The development of a distributed network city along the A2 highway, Netherlands (at an architectural and urban scale).Building TechnologyArchitectur