Sketching: Friend or Foe to the Novice Designer?

Previous research by one of the authors showed that novice designers do not use sketching as a way to generate, develop and communicate design proposals, but move immediately to three-dimensional modelling. Neither do they generate multiple solutions. The follow-up study described here addressed the questions: Does teaching two-dimensional modelling enable Grade 7 pupils to better express their ideas and organize their thoughts? What role does discussion play in pupils' attempts to generate a design proposal? Does the use of contextualising items make a difference to pupils' success with designing? Eight Grade 7 pupils were drawn from each of two classes. One class had received instruction in sketching; the other served as a control group. Each group of eight pupils was divided into single-sex dyads. The eight dyads were videotaped while producing a solution to a common design brief. Analysis of the data has provided insights into the effects of instruction on the proposals produced by pupils. Additionally, their ability to generate, develop and communicate design ideas is enhanced by both the dynamic relationship between pupils' talk and 3D modelling and the way the task is contextualised. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Sketching: Friend or Foe to the Novice Designer?

Previous research by one of the authors showed that novice designers do not use sketching as a way to generate, develop and communicate design proposals, but move immediately to three-dimensional modelling. Neither do they generate multiple solutions.     

Studying the effectiveness of conceptual design in secondary design and technology in England

The purpose of the study reported here was to investigate the effectiveness of a conceptual design unit as part of the Design and Technology curriculum for 14 years old pupils in England. One research question drove this study: What sort of designing do pupils do when they design without having to make what they have designed? Data consisted of the design ideas of a whole class developed during 6 lessons towards the end of an 18 lesson teaching sequence. Findings, which are in line with those of the pilot study, indicate that the pupils’ designing was highly iterative, creative, involved making a wide range of design decisions and revealed understanding of technological concepts.     

Design-without-make: challenging the conventional approach to teaching and learning in a design and technology classroom

The purpose of the study reported here was to investigate the use of a design-without-make unit as part of the design and technology curriculum with pupils aged 14. Three research questions drove the study: (a) What sort of designing do pupils do when they work collaboratively to design without having to make what they have designed? (b) What is the teachers’ attitude to design-without-make? (c) What is the pupils’ attitude to design-without-make? The study is a small pilot and data were collected using semi-structured interviews with a class teacher and two pupils and detailed scrutiny of five pupils’ design ideas developed during 6 lessons towards the end of an 18 lessons teaching sequence. Findings indicate that the teacher and pupils in this study responded favourably to design-without-make. The pupils’ designing was highly iterative, creative, involved making a wide range of design decisions and revealed understanding of technological concepts.     

An investigation of the use of global, virtual, and colocated new product development teams

This paper presents the results of an investigation of differences between global, virtual and colocated new product development (NPD) teams. Specifically, we examined whether and how these three types of teams differed in terms of usage, challenges, and performance. A survey of PDMA members was undertaken to collect the data. Out of 103 firms participating in the survey, 54 had used or were using global teams for some of their NPD efforts. Overall, we found that the use of global teams in our respondent firms is rapidly increasing. Our respondents indicated that by the year 2001, approximately one out of every five NPD teams in their companies are likely to be global. However, our respondents also expect that their companies will be using multiple types of teams that is, global, virtual, and colocated, to develop their new products. Our findings also suggest that global teams generally face greater behavioral and project management challenges than either colocated or virtual teams. Global team performance is also lower than the performance of virtual or colocated teams. Are these challenges associated with poorer performance? In examining this question, our results suggest that greater project management challenges are associated with lower performance, for all three types of teams. Surprisingly, behavioral challenges were not associated with performance for any team type. Our results suggest that firms face different problems associated with managing each type of NPD team—global, virtual and colocated. To effectively manage each type of team may, in turn, require that companies and their managers employ different solutions to these different problems. Additionally, companies may find that the preparation they provide to their managers and team members to work in these different team environments may also need to be different. Further research is clearly needed to address these managerial implications.     

Computer Support for Collaborative Designing

The purpose of the present study was to examine how collaborative designing could be facilitated by a new generation networked learning environment (Future Learning Environment, FLE-Tools) and to analyze whether and how students working in the environment were able to share their design process. The study was carried out by analyzing qualitatively knowledge posted to FLE-Tools’ database by three courses of first-year textile students (N = 34) who were engaged in a collaborative design project that focused on designing clothing for prematurely born babies. The study indicated that designing in the network environment facilitated engagement of expert-like designing in a sense of supporting specification of constraints related to designing clothing to premature neonates through in-depth problem structuring and search of new information. A design challenge of FLE-Tools is to provide more effective tools for collaborative work with visual sketches as well as developing tools and practices that would help to share knowledge emerging not only in the conceptual but also during the actual manufacturing phase of designing. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Exploring pupils’ beliefs about designers and designing

The purpose of this paper is to report on an investigation into pupil beliefs about designers and designing conducted as part of a research project focussing on Designerly Activity in Secondary Design and Technology which builds upon a pilot study (Barlex and Trebell in Int J Technol Design Educ, 2007). Four research questions drove this element of the study: (a) What do pupils believe designers do? (b) What do pupils believe about the knowledge and skills designers must possess? (c) What do pupils believe designers are like? (d) What do pupils believe about the design decisions made by the designer of a given product? This paper compliments the work of Welch et al. (Designing the future: The design and technology association international research conference 2006, University of Wolverhampton, Telford, 2006) relating to student beliefs about designers and designing by drawing on some elements of the research design to inform this study. Pupil responses to questions relating to the role of the designer, what designers are like and what designers need to know are in line with the findings of Welch et al. (Designing the future: The design and technology association international research conference 2006, University of Wolverhampton, Telford, 2006) in their study of elementary students beliefs about designers and designing with both studies concluding that the qualities ascribed to the designer are positive and non-stereotypical—they can be young or old, female or male.     

Sketching by design: teaching sketching to young learners

Recent science educational reforms in the United States have prompted increased efforts to teach engineering design as an approach to improve STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) learning in K-12 classrooms. Teaching design in early grades is a new endeavor for teachers in the United States. Much can be learned from design teaching and research on K-12 design education outside of the US. The purpose of this study was to explore how students learn and use design sketching to support their learning of science and design practices. Researchers provided a treatment of design sketching instruction based on best practices of prior research finding (Hope in Des Technol Educ Int J 10: 43–53, 2005; Gustafson et al. J Technol Educ 19(1):19–34, 2007). A delayed treatment model was used to provide a two-group counterbalanced quasi-experimental design to compare an experimental group and comparison (delayed treatment) group results from (6) grade 3 classrooms. Researchers employed Hope’s Des Technol Educ Int J 10: 43–53, (2005) frame to organize sketching data for analysis. Findings from this study indicated that design instruction treatment did improve student’s design and communication practices, moving from using sketching as a container of ideas to the use of sketching as a form of design communication and to refine design ideas. Both the treatment and comparison groups improved sketching skills after treatment was provided to both groups. Sketching is a design practice that can also help student learn science concepts through the generation of mental models of conceptual understanding.     

Emotions and the spatialisation of social relations in text‐based computer‐mediated communication

This paper advances our knowledge of emotions in virtual teams using text‐based computer‐mediated communication. The literature's preoccupation with the absence of physical cues of emotion has meant we lack both an understanding of how emotions are co‐constructed through interaction and an explanation of their role in the social relations of virtual teams. Adopting a communicative view of emotion, we present the findings of a longitudinal study of a virtual team within a transnational collaborative project. We present three aspects of interaction that demonstrate how team members' experience and understanding of the emotions expressed through, and suppressed from, text‐based messages are influenced by the styles and patterns of interaction enabled by technology. Where our three aspects tend towards stasis, we argue that emotion provides a temporal dimension to a process of ‘spatialising’ social relations by connoting what should change, or what should endure, between people.     

Overcoming consumer resistance to innovations – an analysis of adoption triggers

Traditionally, innovation adoption research has focused on the determinants of the states ‘adoption’ and ‘nonadoption’. Aiming at a more detailed understanding of innovation adoption and resistance behavior, this study takes a different perspective and analyzes the transition stage between the nonadoption state and the adoption state to investigate triggers that overcome initial consumer resistance. The study seeks to answer three questions within this novel perspective: (1) What are triggers that lead nonadopters to become adopters? (2) Do adopters and nonadopters differ in their assessment of adoption triggers? and (3) How do adoption triggers relate to innovation adoption barriers? We apply a qualitative exploratory approach that relies on 160 face‐to‐face interviews with both adopters and nonadopters about nine different innovations to generate a framework of adoption triggers. The results reveal that adoption triggers fall into three broad categories: ‘increasing innovation attraction’, ‘reducing barriers’ or ‘tilting the system’. In addition, we find that adopters and nonadopters differ significantly in their assessment of (potential) adoption triggers. Nonadopters mention performance improvements more frequently as crucial adoption triggers than adopters do. In contrast, adopters indicate knowledge acquisition and a social system push significantly more often than nonadopters do. However, adoption triggers and corresponding adoption barriers do not appear to be linked in a systematic way. Instead, adoption triggers such as a social system push exert influence independent of the existing adoption barriers. We suggest strategies for pre‐ and postlaunch strategies to facilitate adoption triggers. We also discuss the implications of our findings for theory and present further research opportunities.     

Learning to think spatially in an undergraduate interdisciplinary computational design context: a case study

Spatial thinking skills are vital for success in everyday living and work, not to mention the centrality of spatial reasoning in scientific discoveries, design-based disciplines, medicine, geosciences and mathematics to name a few. This case study describes a course in spatial thinking and communicating designed and delivered by an interdisciplinary team over a three-year period to first-year university students. Four major elements provide a framework for the sequencing of instruction and acquisition of 2D and 3D spatial thinking and reasoning skills in a computational design context. We describe the process of introducing students to computational design environments beginning with a fun and familiar tool in preparation for a more complex, industry-standard system (SolidWorks). A design project provides diverse student teams an opportunity to integrate and apply foundational spatial concepts and skills including sketching, 2D and 3D representations, as well as digital and physical modeling. Samples of student work illustrate the scaffolding necessary for students to successfully draw upon the spatial thinking and communication skills required to complete their team projects beginning with applying sketching techniques; modeling individual 3D parts; creating digital assemblies; and finally building the equivalent 3D physical model. Key instructional principles provide a framework for the analysis of what worked and what didn’t in relation to spatial skills development in students. The lessons learned are identified along with potential future directions for teaching and learning scholarship in spatial thinking development within a computational design context.     

Mergers and acquisitions by Chinese firms: A review and comparison with other mergers and acquisitions research in the leading journals

In recent years, an increasing number of Chinese firms have been engaged in acquisitions both inside and outside of China. Nevertheless, our understanding of Chinese merger and acquisition (M&A) activity is limited because a majority of M&As in the past 100 years have been performed by firms from developed countries and it is those M&As that have been the focus of prior research. Thus this paper aims to address the following research questions: What are the new insights gained from Chinese M&A research? What are the emerging future directions of Chinese M&A research? To address those questions, this article provides a thorough literature review of the most recent M&A research in top journals and studies of M&As both inside and outside of China. Consequently, we identify both new insights from Chinese M&A research and the research gaps that Chinese M&A research needs to fulfill compared with general M&A research in top journals. We further highlight the important and unique characteristics of Chinese M&As and call for future research.     

A novel CAI system for space conceptualization training in perspective sketching

For many designers, freehand sketching is the primary tool for conceptualization in the early stage of the design process. However, current education on concept presentation techniques rarely emphasizes the construction of the most fundamental spatial unit, the cube. Incorrect construction of spatial units leads to disproportions that deviate from the common visual experience, and consequently slows down the design process. In addition, weak spatial cognition can be a problem when transferring sketches into orthographic drawings. To address these issues, this research focuses on the training of cube sketching techniques using both freehand skills and digital devices. Based on the station-point approach for two-point perspective drawings, this study developed a computer-assisted instruction (CAI) platform for beginners, with which users can practice freehand sketching for self-improvement. This platform provides instant corrective feedback to every freehand-sketched cube, thus promoting better learning outcome and more effective use of educational resources. Similar platforms have not yet been found in the field. The proposed system’s feasibility and practicality were evaluated through a series of teaching experiments. The results indicated that the proposed CAI system can improve students’ sketching accuracy by 19% after 6 weeks of instruction, and that the proposed system was found to be more effective than traditional pen-and-pencil instructions in advancing sketching techniques.     

Figuring the world of designing: Expert participation in elementary classroom

The purpose of the present article was to analyze the interaction between elementary students and a professional design expert. The expert was present in the classroom, facilitating a collaborative lamp designing process together with the teacher. Using the notion of figured worlds (Holland et al. 1998), we explored how learning could be expanded beyond traditional schooling by bridging the world of professional designing and the world of the inquiry-oriented classroom. The data consisted of video-recorded design sessions (N = 11) and the “Lamp Designing” view of the project’s electronic database. A qualitative content analysis was conducted for categorizing the social settings, the design inquiry phases, and the designer’s activities during the sessions. Three distinctive foci of the participants’ activity were identified in the present study: (1) Design rationale, (2) Design practices, and (3) Design community. The results indicate that, with the designer’s support, relatively young students became aware of the rationale directing the design practice, and were able to solve multifaceted, complex design tasks. The figured world of designing was collaboratively created in the classroom during the continuous interaction between the designer and the students. This enabled the students to recognize the meaning of the diverse design activities and practices they were learning. The figured world of designing was perceived as a world of possibility for the students, providing them new insights for learning within the world of schooling.     

Technological innovation of firms in China: Past, present, and future

What do we know about technological innovation of firms in China? What are the directions for future research on this topic? This paper summarizes and discusses some of the newest literature on technological innovation of firms in China in the following three ways: (1) the influence of firms?? external factors, (2) the influence of firms?? internal factors, and (3) interfirm cooperation factors. Based on the analysis of these articles, we propose a framework which highlights these influencing factors, decision-making and implementation of technological innovation and innovation performance, in the context of China??s emerging economy. This framework sheds lights on future innovation research.     

Global customer team design: Dimensions, determinants, and performance outcomes

Designing and implementing global customer teams (GCTs) represents a key task for suppliers that are expanding the scope of their customer relationships. However, research has not provided an explanation of how these teams function and what determines their performance. Using an interdisciplinary combination of concepts from customer management and organizational behavior research streams, we develop an integrative framework of GCT design and performance. The framework is conceptualized with qualitative interview data and validated with survey data from 273 members of 113 GCTs in six multinational companies. Our results indicate that team performance is influenced directly by three team processes: communication and collaboration, conflict management, and proactiveness. Team design in terms of goal and role definition, customer coverage, empowerment, heterogeneity, skills adequacy, and leadership indirectly influences performance, mediated by team processes. In addition, three factors of the organizational environment—top management support, rewards and incentives, and training—have similar indirect effects.     

Entrepreneurial knowledge spillovers: discovering opportunities through understanding mediated spatial relationships

In recent years, increased attention has been directed toward the formation of new ventures from new knowledge that is created by incumbent firms. This process focuses on a firm-centric approach that considers entrepreneurial opportunities from a spin-off and an endogenous perspective. Differently, what kind of Knowledge Spillovers (KSs) can influence the development of a start-up from an exogenous perspective? Considering this point of view, in what ways can knowledge be transferred? What kind of spatial filter can influence the travel of knowledge?Analyzing the KSs that sustain the growth of the start-up with a collaborative approach, the Geppetto case study concerns the main dyadic relationships developed by an Italian start- up thanks to its relationship with an Incubator. As these findings demonstrate, network entrepreneurial KSs are activated by “generating relationship” between the Incubator and its main business partners, which then are used in the “recipient relationship”. In this latter instance, the business partners of the Incubator become partners of the start–up thereby improving its growth. In particular this transfer of knowledge occurs in a relational space between heterogeneous actors that are characterized by business relational proximity.     

Your new product development (NPD) is only as good as your process: an exploratory analysis of new NPD process design and implementation

Given industry competitiveness, how do firms' new product development (NPD) process designs differ when responding to an innovation mandate? How do NPD design elements differ across firms when implementing NPD processes? These design elements are strategic business unit (SBU) senior management involvement, business case content, customer interactions, and cross‐functional integration. What are the consequences of different combinations of NPD process design elements for innovation productivity? We explore these questions via a collective case study of newly implemented NPD process designs at three different SBUs of a major US‐based international conglomerate, 1 year after receiving the mandate to grow through innovation. Our analysis suggests that industry competitiveness and firm characteristics influence the NPD process design as SBUs employ distinct combinations of NPD design elements. The differential emphasis on design elements leads to variation in process design and divergence in innovation productivity.