COMET. A Method for Analysing Collective Design Processes

Projet EIFFELThis paper focuses on modelling collective design, especially co-operative activities in co-design situations. Cognitive psychologists have proposed various methods for the analysis of verbal individual protocols, but much less for dialogues in collective work settings. Many professional activities, however, are carried out by people working together through verbal interaction- s. A method is proposed for analysing activities of designers during the meetings in which they are working together on a design project (i.e. their dialogues, and their generation and use of external representations). This research has a triple objective: modelling collective-design activities (especially the reasoning component), proposing a data-analysis methodology for cognitive psychologists and other researchers interested by collective design, and extending verbal protocol analysis to collective work situations. The method will be illustrated through data collected in studies on the co-operation in co-design situations in two different collective-design tasks, software design and design of local area networks