Design Engineering
Showcase 2020

Asynchronous Distributed communication channels – email and chat - are the two most popular means of team communication in the industry. However, they are found to have the lowest level of shared understanding and team effectiveness, and thus can lead to lower team creativity in multidisciplinary teamwork. Our co-occurrence analysis of emerged themes from the literature of multidisciplinary collaboration, mapped with tools from CSCW allowed us to define a gap in the industry relevance of the proposed tools. Our research aims to better understand shared understanding in distributed multidisciplinary collaboration and how can we increase team creativity and effectiveness in virtual collaboration. By studying social construction processes in our qualitative research, we will focus on the means by which multidisciplinary team members go about constructing shared mental models through virtual communication channels. The project will encompass ethnographic research over the period of one year, transcripts from netnographic data sources and interviews conducted within a London start-up.

We are still recruiting participants to join our study on remote teams - join our Imperial Research community with the access to study insights within the future of work discourse!