If you build it, will they understand? Considerations for creating shared understanding through design artifacts

Design representations play a pivotal role in the design process. In particular, design representations enable the formation of a shared understanding between team members, enhancing team performance. This paper explores the relationship between design representation modality and shared understanding among designers during communicative acts between design dyads. A mixed-methods study with 40 designers was conducted to investigate if representation modality affects shared understanding and identify the factors that shape shared understanding during communication. Quantitative results suggest that low-fidelity prototypes and sketches did not significantly differ in terms of the shared understanding they facilitated within dyads. Qualitative analysis identified four factors at the representation- and actor-level that influence how shared understanding is built between individuals during design communication. This research extends our understanding of the utility of design representations given the needs of communicative contexts; specifically, this work demonstrates that designers must understand the perspectives of listeners during communication to create representations that accurately represent the information that a listener seeks to gain.