Design Team Communication and Design Task Complexity: The Preference for Dialogues

Abstract The way in which dialogues and group meetings affect the progress of multidisciplinary architectural design teams can be easily underestimated by managers. This is due to the importance of group meetings to review designs, share information, make decisions and hence progress the design. The aim of this paper is to discuss how design dialogues and design team meetings facilitate team communication. A review of research into design team communication and performance using a project website provides an insight into how design team members used and changed their synchronous and asynchronous communication while adopting the project web. Case studies were used to investigate changes in communication practices affecting team performance due to project web use. Research findings reveal a preference among design team members for dialogue as their favourite communication medium despite the growing use of asynchronous communication by teams. Results are discussed against research findings from communication in design and management team meetings. Implications for design managers, concerned with improving communications and the management of design, are discussed in the light of the research findings.