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During the spring semester of 1997, I offered an informal workshop / discussion group to graduate students at the Institute of Design who were interested in reflecting on, and discussing, their experiences as members of design project teams and in improving their teamwork skills.
In addition to contributing to my early dissertation research on multidisciplinary design and development teams, these discussions were meant to contribute to the improvement of participants' experiences on graduate student teams while they were in school and on design project teams (or as design project managers) over the course of their careers. It has been my experience that design project managers tend to be crummy people managers. Maybe it has something to do with their generally massive egos.
It was suggested that, as designers (certainly as design project managers), these students would be responsible for bringing to a design team the knowledge of how individual team members might work together as a successful and productive group. A goal for our workshop discussions was to codify that knowledge in some form in order to develop a proposal for a course (or a seminar or a one-day workshop) to be offered to the general ID student population. Some of the questions we addressed included: What do you need to know about working on ID design teams in order to get by? and Can that knowledge be generalized up to a set of skills that will be of value to designers and design project managers in the field?
This work has been put on hold -- at least temporarily -- as my primary focus has shifted away from team dynamics and toward the utilization of certain types of information in group problem-solving processes.