Perceived difficulty of design thinking activities in co-located and remote environments

Abstract

What kinds of challenges do teams face when engaged in design thinking in co-located and remote working environments? This paper demonstrates the perceived difficulty of different design activities and how they compare to one another. A framework comprising nine individual design activities is used to map out experiences of six multicultural, distributed student design teams. The results illustrate how decision-making is perceived as one of the most difficult activities. Shifts in ranking between environments are also explored.

Keywords

• Design thinking
• global innovation
• virtual teams
• product development
• engineering education.