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AI-based design tools are proliferating in professional software to assist engineering and industrial designers in complex manufacturing and design tasks. These tools take on more agentic roles than traditional computer-aided design tools and are often portrayed as “co-creators.” Yet, working effectively with such systems requires different skills than working with complex CAD tools alone. To date, we know little about how engineering designers learn to work with AI-based design tools. In this study, we observed trained designers as they learned to work with two AI-based tools on a realistic design task. We find that designers face many challenges in learning to effectively co-create with current systems, including challenges in understanding and adjusting AI outputs and in communicating their design goals. Based on our findings, we highlight several design opportunities to better support designer-AI co-creation.
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Objects of Collaboration: Roles of Objects in Spanning Knowledge Boundaries in a Design Company
Engineering designers often span knowledge boundaries when developing complex systems but doing so poses challenges because members of different knowledge groups must bridge their language, cognitions, and “thought worlds” to effectively broker, resituate, and make use of each other’s ideas. Objects— ranging from prototypes to kanban boards to value stream maps—are frequently used in cross-functional design practice, but the outcomes associated with such objects appear varied and dependent not only the objects’ characteristics but on how, when, and by whom they are used. This paper describes a two-year inductive ethnographic study within a turbomachinery design company to understand how cross-functional design teams span their knowledge boundaries to advance their designs and design processes. We collected observations of 70 cross-functional meetings and 52 interviews across functional groups during the development of complex turbomachinery products. Our findings include three roles of objects of collaboration: routinizing cross- boundary interaction, translating information across boundaries, and motivating joint negotiation or discovery. We found two prominent outcomes—co-discovery of a design risk, opportunity, or workflow bottleneck and co-design of a joint integrated solution— that appeared to follow from the latter two roles, respectively. These findings are significant because they clarify the roles of objects in cross-boundary design work and suggest ways for designers to more effectively use objects to span knowledge boundaries.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1716992
- PAR ID:
- 10378489
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2022-89388
