Perceived difficulty of design thinking activities in co-located and remote environments

What kinds of challenges do teams face when engaged in design thinking in co-located and remote working environments? This paper demonstrates the perceived difficulty of different design activities and how they compare to one another. A framework comprising nine individual design activities is used to map out experiences of six multicultural, distributed student design teams. The results illustrate how decision-making is perceived as one of the most difficult activities. Shifts in ranking between environments are also explored

Experiencing emotions in design thinking : How positive and negative affects play their part in the innovation process

Emotions have been recently recognized to have a significant impact on the innovation process and its outcomes. However, little is known regarding how teams are experiencing distinct emotions throughout the varying stages of the innovation process. This study analyzes design thinking teams' self-reported emotional states and explores the emotional spectrum associated with various innovation activities. The Geneva Emotion Wheel instrument is used to map relations between 20 emotions and nine generic innovation activities that occurred during a two-week project.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Future states: design and science for sustainability

In 2017 CERN IdeaSquare collaborated with the Royal College of Art, London to explore how an interdisciplinary approach to innovation that combines science, technology, design and business might address the global sustainability challenges as embodied in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals 2030. This collaboration examined how an interdisciplinary design led model of innovation that fuses design thinking with scientific discovery, could enable the innovative and potentially disruptive technologies from CERN to address the world’s most intractable challenges, and specifically the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In this paper we explore the nature of interdisciplinary innovation, recent trends in its approach, and describe the way this has been applied, through action research, to generate product service systems that address the UN’s SDGs

Antecedents and cases of Impact Innovation – Recent studies from Europe

This special issue presents 4 selected papers that have an emphasis on either the antecedents or provide concrete cases of impact innovation. Across the papers, the authors approach the topic of impact innovation from distinct angles, from measures of personal innovativeness to the power of physical teamwork, to the purpose of prototyping and entrepreneurial attitudes. This serves to demonstrate that innovation is not a linear process but rather a complex phenomenon that can be studied from a multitude of technical and social perspectives

Tuotekehitysaktiviteettien vaikeuden kartoittaminen tuotekehitystiimin työssä

It is currently believed that a multicultural team is a good unit for innovation. In order to support such teams in their work, it is important to understand what kind of challenges they face when performing product design activities. This work focuses on answering, how difficult different design activities are according to the design team members’ experience, when compared to one another (e.g. how difficult is ideation when compared with decision making). It is also important to study how difficult the activities are in both co-located and remote environments, since the product development teams can be distributed. Based on a literature review, observations and synthesis, a novel framework was created comprising of nine individual design activities. This framework was then used to map out experiences of six multicultural, distributed design teams and how difficult they felt each of the nine activities was for their design team. The research was conducted in the context of Challenge Based Innovation -course collaboration, coordinated by CERN. As a result, a holistic overview of how the different activities compare to one another was obtained. In conclusion, the remote activities were all seen as more difficult than the co-located activities. Remotely, the most difficult activities were linked with convergence and when co-located, real world engagement was seen as most challenging. In addition, effects of the team member’s background, gender and location on the experience were studied as well as the emerging correlations between different activities.Monikulttuurisen tiimin uskotaan olevan hyvä innovaatiotoiminnan yksikkö. Jotta tällaisten tiimien toimintaa voidaan tukea, on tärkeä ymmärtää, millaisia haasteita tiimit kohtaavat työssään. Tässä työssä pyritään vastaamaan kysymykseen, kuinka vaikeita eri tuotekehitysaktiviteetit ovat suhteessa toisiinsa tiimijäsenten kokemuksen perusteella (esimerkiksi miten vaikeaa ideointi on suhteessa päätösten tekemiseen). Koska tiimit saattavat olla hajautettuja, on myös tärkeä ymmärtää, miten vaikeita nämä aktiviteetit ovat tiimille sekä etänä, että läsnä ollessa. Kirjallisuuskatsauksen, havaintojen ja synteesin pohjalta tuotettiin uusi, yhdeksän design aktiviteettia sisältävä kehys. Tätä kehystä käytettiin kartoittamaan kuuden poikkitieteellisen tuotekehitystiimin kokemuksia siitä, miten vaikeita kukin näistä aktiviteetista oli heidän tiimilleen. Tutkimus toteutettiin CERN:n koordinoiman Challenge Based Innovation kurssin puitteissa. Tuloksissa esitellään yleiskatsaus siihen, miten eri aktiviteetit suhtautuvat toisiinsa. Tiimin jäsenet kokivat kaikki etänä toteutetut aktiviteetit vaikeampina kuin tiimin ollessa läsnä. Etänä vaikeimmat toiminnot liittyivät yhteisymmärryksen saavuttamiseen kun taas läsnä ollessa vaikeinta oli projektin realistisesti ulkomaailmaan kytkeminen. Tutkimuksessa kartoitettiin lisäksi tiimin jäsenten taustan, sijainnin ja sukupuolen vaikutusta vaikeuden kokemukseen, samoin kuin eri aktiviteettien välisiä korrelaatioita

Container Challenge – Prototyping Distributed Collaboration

This paper describes the process and results of “Container Challenge”, a remote collaboration exercise that was designed to help global, multi-disciplinary teams to prototype their online collaboration tools while they were still co-located during a course kick-off at CERN. The exercise was organized in the first week of advanced product design course called Challenge Based Innovation, where the multidisciplinary students from countries around Europe met each other for two weeks to start a five-month long collaboration. The teams worked on a short design challenge in “containers” that simulated the coming division they would encounter after travelling back to their home universities. The purpose of the exercise was to help the teams to use prototyping and iterative design methods, not only on products and services, but also while designing their own working process. The previous experiences from similar courses has shown to authors, that a dedicated exercise would be needed to guide the teams to actually test and improve their collaboration plans during their first two weeks together. While there was no statistically significant comparison, the implemented Container Challenge -exercise seemed to have positive effects in developing collaboration plan; the challenge brought out several issues related to distributed work, including the need for virtual empathy and occurrence of increased complication when reflecting on the design activities. It also managed to serve as a shared learning experience that could be used to improve the future collaboration of the teams

Mapping remote and multidisciplinary learning barriers: lessons from challenge-based innovation at CERN

This paper presents the experienced difficulties of students participating in the multidisciplinary, remote collaborating engineering design course challenge-based innovation at CERN. This is with the aim to identify learning barriers and improve future learning experiences. We statistically analyse the rated differences between distinct design activities, educational background and remote vs. co-located collaboration. The analysis is based on a quantitative and qualitative questionnaire (N = 37). Our analysis found significant ranking differences between remote and co-located activities. This questions whether the remote factor might be a barrier for the originally intended learning goals. Further a correlation between analytical and converging design phases was identified. Hence, future facilitators are suggested to help students in the transition from one design phase to the next rather than only teaching methods in the individual design phases. Finally, we discuss how educators address the identified learning barriers when designing future courses including multidisciplinary or remote collaboration