Integrative bargaining paradigm for investigating multidisciplinary design tradeoffs

In design teams, decision making entails negotiation among parties pursuing common goals with potentially divergent interests and objectives (Bucciarelli, 1988). In multidisciplinary design teams, these parties negotiate from perspectives further biased by their respective backgrounds, expertise, and roles. System design can be improved if we better understand how technical data are communicated and assimilated, how mutually advantageous tradeoffs are discovered, and how the managing of design tradeoffs can best be supported. As part of our larger research effort in Collaborative Design Technology, we are examining the processes by which integrative design tradeoffs are realized, in preparation for enhancing these processes through data visualization and communication tools facilitating mutual understanding and consensual decision making. This initial report describes our work to date in creating and validating an experimental paradigm to serve as a testbed for subsequent studies of multidisciplinary design practice. This paper describes the paradigm and the initial attempts to demonstrate its ecological validity. This initial validation effort involved a comparison of novices and experts in the field of design and their performance on the design decision making task. We found that experts performed better than novices on the design task, which provided initial validation support for the experimental paradigm.