Mental Models and Creativity in Engineering and Architectural Design Teams

Mental models play a decisive role when it comes to cooperate and coordinate team activities in complex environments and contexts. However, scientific knowledge about the coordination of mental models in heterogeneous groups, and even more across different disciplines, has not yield much progress in the last decades. Mental models affect design activities on content and process levels. These have consequences for the different phases in the design process, from the first moment of defining the problem till the final decision for detail design. The present paper focuses on the comparison of two different design disciplines, and analyzes how problems demanding creativity are approached. Two meetings of engineering and architectural teams solving a complex domain-specific design problem in the very early stage of idea generation were studied. Utterances of the transcripts from both team sessions have been explored based on the categorisation system developed explicitly for the analysis of group behaviour in complex environments. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are presented, from which conclusions about the differences in design problem solving processes of design teams with different disciplinary backgrounds are offered.