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Coordination in innovative design and engineering: observations from a lunar robotics project

Published: 07 November 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Coordinating activities across groups in systems engineering or product development projects is critical to project success, but substantially more difficult when the work is innovative and dynamic. It is not clear how technology should best support cross-group collaboration on these types of projects. Recent work on coordination in dynamic settings has identified cross-boundary knowledge exchange as a critical mechanism for aligning activities. In order to inform the design of collaboration technology for creative work settings, we examined the nature of cross-group knowledge exchange in an innovative engineering research project developing a lunar rover robot as part of the Google Lunar X-Prize competition. Our study extends the understanding of communication and coordination in creative design work, and contributes to theory on coordination. We introduce four types of cross-team knowledge exchange mechanisms we observed on this project and discuss challenges associated with each. We consider implications for the design of collaboration technology to support cross-team knowledge exchange in dynamic, creative work environments.

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Cited By

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  • (2018)Reframing Taxonomy Development in Collaborative Computing Research: A Review and Synthesis of CSCW Literature 2003–2010Collaboration and Technology10.1007/978-3-319-99504-5_5(42-59)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2018
  • (2016)Coupling Interactions and Performance: Predicting Team Performance from Thin Slices of ConflictACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/275376723:3(1-32)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2016

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cover image ACM Conferences
GROUP '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work
November 2010
378 pages
ISBN:9781450303873
DOI:10.1145/1880071
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 November 2010

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Author Tags

  1. collaboration
  2. communication
  3. coordination
  4. design
  5. engineering
  6. groups
  7. intergroup collaboration
  8. multi-group project
  9. teams

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GROUP '10: ACM 2010 International Conference on Supporting Group Work
November 7 - 10, 2010
Florida, Sanibel Island, USA

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View all
  • (2018)Reframing Taxonomy Development in Collaborative Computing Research: A Review and Synthesis of CSCW Literature 2003–2010Collaboration and Technology10.1007/978-3-319-99504-5_5(42-59)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2018
  • (2016)Coupling Interactions and Performance: Predicting Team Performance from Thin Slices of ConflictACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/275376723:3(1-32)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2016

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