Framing innovation: negotiating shared frames during early design phases

Abstract

Members of newly formed design teams have different framesimplicit values, goals and assumptions -each of them hold about what problems are important and how they are best addressed. In the early, informal phases of design projects, these frames, and the degree to which they are shared within the team, have substantial consequences. However, little is known about the interactions and activities that reveal frames and support frame sharing in teams. Our study follows 22 newly-formed multi-disciplinary teams through the early phases of the design process in a New Product Development course. We used a mixed method, interdisciplinary approach to understand the dynamic process through which design frames are socially negotiated and shared. We identified core framing activities of design teams and propose a framing cycle of pseudo-frame setting, making individuals' frames explicit, making frame conflicts salient, and building a common frame.

The Blank Page: Effects of Constraint on Creativity

“…While this is undeniable, this particular setting offers more external validity than is typical of classroom studies. It is common for teams to end up patenting their products, seeking venture capital funding, and taking them to market; many pursue product development or design as a postgraduation career (Hey, Joyce & Beckman, 2007). The extent of work and high emotional involvement of the projects, and the course's well-known potential for helping graduate students find post-graduation jobs, are also reasons that the phenomena observed in this course is more generalizable than might otherwise be expected.…”

“…These choices take two main forms: Choices about search behavior (whether to search, what to search for, where to search, when to stop) and choices about the selection of alternatives. The creative process is filled with decisions (Mumford, Mobley, Uhlman, ReiterPaulmon & Doares, 1991), ranging from how to frame problems (Hey, Joyce & Beckman, 2007), to where to search for ideas (March, 1988), to how to select ideas (Cropley 2006;Runco 2003).…”

Pragmatic Software Innovation

“…As the vision develops, it will usually grow increasingly stable as the product is tested with customers and users. Still, the vision remains changeable and allows the project to adapt to changes by guiding without excessive detail [23].…”

Supporting the synthesis of information in design teams

“…In related work, this understanding of synthesis also may be referred to as collaborative synthesis [32], framing [13,14,35], sensemaking [25,30], collaborative sensemaking [27,39], or information analysis [17].…”

“…Many practitioners recognize this as a "magical" part of the process where raw information is synthesized to generate new knowledge [16,21,29]. It is particularly difficult to develop a shared understanding of user data among all team members, because people have diverse individual perspectives that guide their interpretations [14,28].…”