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COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- ERDC Environmental Laboratory (EL) Science, Mathematics And Research for Transformation (SMART) Student Matthew Wood recently earned Best Design Cognition Paper with colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University at the Design Computing and Cognition 12 Conference at the Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.
The award recognized the paper, “The Role of Design Team Structure on Individual and Shared Mental Models.” The paper describes an experiment on student design team’s communication and its relationship to developing a shared representation of a design problem. Metrics for describing changes in mental models for ill-defined problems are also described and evaluated. Additionally, a focus on describing individual changes in cognition over time with respect to the individuals earlier representations and to the final output of their design problem solving was outlined.
These metrics can be used to monitor the progress of teams on design projects, and may be able to predict the quality of resulting design solutions invariant of the specific design context.
Wood works under the direction of EL’s Dr. Igor Linkov on mental models research for risk management and organizational improvement. This research and understanding is important for organizations like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and ERDC, specifically, because of the heterogeneous knowledge required to fulfill mission requirements in the context of many projects.