Benefits of a research methodology from organisational sciences for analysing design interactions
Résumé
As manufactured products and industrial organisation become more complex, design implies more and more experts having to cooperate. Our research focuses on understanding and supporting activities and interactions during synchronous cooperative design phases, such as design reviews. This paper concerns a research methodology from the organisational sciences used to render different types of knowledge explicit in regards to such cooperative design processes. We first present this research methodology. Then, while bearing in mind that design is part of the sciences of the artificial but also a social activity, we explore from this methodological perspective a corpus of design interactions we collected at the Volvo Truck company. We reflect upon the research activities we led while gathering and analyzing this corpus and we explore the benefits that activating this methodology in a design context could gain for us. Conditions for success of this activation are discussed.