HO-18-C025 -- Forming Design Teams for Improved Performances

The increasing complexity of design makes it necessary to consider different ways to organize design projects, as the interaction with other disciplines andstakeholders in the conceptual design phase becomes more and more important increases. The need is urgently felt on a daily basis to achieve earlyintegration of disciplines and parties. The traditional hierarchical roles with the conceptual design will need to be adjusted and it is important that thedesign process participants become a team. There are techniques to ensure that a new team starts in a good way. Usually a team goes through four phasesbefore it is really tuned to each other. Tuckman has described the development of cooperation within groups. Groups develop themselves in a certain orderinto a team: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. It is a good model for the analyzing the steps within the development of cooperationwithin a team and can be used to illustrate the steps of morphological approach. In connection with the Integral design research project for professional inthe Dutch building industry, we developed an educational project, the master project integral design. Interaction between practice, research and educationforms the core of the 'integral approach'. In this research well over two hundred professionals participated as well as four hundred students in differentcourses and projects. Therefore the concept of the integral design workshop for professionals was implemented within the start-up workshop of ourmultidisciplinary masters' project. The basis of this project, which serves as a learning-by-doing start-up workshop for master students, is the IntegralDesign method with its use of morphological overviews. The frame work of the approach is described as well as the positive quantitate and qualitied effectson the collaboration between the design team's members as result of the morphological approach.