Abstract
Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaborations are increasing in all sectors, from companies to universities. As a consequence, design teams are becoming more and more heterogeneous; it thus becomes fundamental to improve teamwork for heterogeneous teams. Designer’s interpretation ability is a fundamental skill, but it might be strictly connected to the designer’s personal experience and can, therefore, be strongly biased. Are design students aware of this? If not, how can they be supported to manage diversity? In this paper, we first introduce our research that is aimed at better understanding the role of biases in the design process and in heterogeneous teams. We afterward present the development of a web-based tool designed to improve design teams’ dynamics by making students more aware of their biases from the beginning of the design process. The results of the tool testing on 79 students of two different classes of a Design Studio Course are presented and discussed.
Keywords
design tool, heterogeneous teams, biases, mutual understanding
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.445
Citation
Mattioli, F., Ferraris, S., Ferraro, V., and Rampino, L. (2018) Mybias: A web-based Tool to Overcome Designers’ Biases in Heterogeneous Design Teams, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.445
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Mybias: A web-based Tool to Overcome Designers’ Biases in Heterogeneous Design Teams
Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaborations are increasing in all sectors, from companies to universities. As a consequence, design teams are becoming more and more heterogeneous; it thus becomes fundamental to improve teamwork for heterogeneous teams. Designer’s interpretation ability is a fundamental skill, but it might be strictly connected to the designer’s personal experience and can, therefore, be strongly biased. Are design students aware of this? If not, how can they be supported to manage diversity? In this paper, we first introduce our research that is aimed at better understanding the role of biases in the design process and in heterogeneous teams. We afterward present the development of a web-based tool designed to improve design teams’ dynamics by making students more aware of their biases from the beginning of the design process. The results of the tool testing on 79 students of two different classes of a Design Studio Course are presented and discussed.