A semantic network approach to analyzing virtual team interactions in the early stages of conceptual design

The early stages of engineering projects are considered the most critical phase of a product lifecycle and need to be better understood. The augmented virtualization and geographic dispersion of project environments create demand for an adaptive design research methodology, which takes the increasing role of distributed online interactions into account. This work presents a generic approach for the quasi-real-time exploration of collaboration structures captured from heterogeneous groupware and communication resources. We introduce Team Collaboration Networks (TCN) as a model to describe the temporal relationships between different actors and information resources over the course of collaboration. A service-based TCN implementation has been applied in eleven distributed engineering design projects to support in the assessment of communication patterns and to provide a live view into the online communication activities of conceptual design teams. The key findings of this pilot application are presented.