Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2015, Management

Today, in a world context defined by increasing complexity, deepening disparities and rising uncertainty, the imperative of connecting knowledge with action to create systemic social change and achieve more equitable futures for all human beings is greater than ever. The task is ongoing and necessitates both the adaptation of known solutions and the discovery of new possibilities. This dissertation investigates the subject matter of design as a deeply humanistic knowledge domain that is drawing mounting attention and praise for its ability to open up new possibilities for action oriented toward social innovation and human progress. Paradoxically, despite unequivocal signs of such forms of design gaining prominence in our institutions and organizations, the unique value that professional designers impart to the class of systemic challenges and innovation opportunities at stake is an understudied pursuit that lacks articulation and merits elucidation. This dissertation contributes to filling that critical gap. Integrating theories of social innovation, organizational culture, institutional logics and design, and building on the construct of “design attitude” (a set of unique capabilities, abilities and dispositions espoused by professional designers and that are related to organizational learning and innovation), the dissertation relies on the interpretation and analyses of three independent field studies organized in a multiphase mixed methods exploratory design sequence. The dissertation is organized in a dialectical progression that presents the following overarching research question: How might we elucidate the value designers bring to the field of social innovation? The first study combines a grounded theory approach with a comparative semantic analysis of four case studies of design for social innovation projects (conducted with design teams from IDEO.org, Frog Design, Mind Lab and the former Helsinki Design Lab). The insights culled from semi-struct (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Buchanan PhD (Committee Chair); Richard Boland Jr. PhD (Committee Member); Kalle Lyytinen PhD (Committee Member); John Paul Stephens PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Design; Entrepreneurship; Management

MDES, University of Cincinnati, 2012, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Design

We live in a world where both strategic and operational advantages are driven by collaboration and sharing. To enable the collaborative innovation within a cross-functional team, transparent and efficient communication is necessary. Designers are trained to be proficient in communicating ideas through visual languages which can be easily identified and understood, naturally designers excel in describing and delivering information within a multi-disciplinary team environment. More importantly, being experts in divergent thinking from “naive” end-user perspective, designers prefer to bring creative ideas with comprehensive consideration of the product eco-system. However, in a collaborative working context, the value of design as communication media has not been well recognized because of the stereotyped view from outside disciplines as well as the individual weakness from the designers' lack of experience in project lifecycle management. This study attempts to frame a coherent model by which the effectiveness of design communication can be fully executed into the collaborative innovation. Issues like how to influence team decision making by taking full advantage of user-centered design thinking and multi-media design implementations will be discussed. The model of integrating the design process into product and team development process will be addressed and applied in the empirical case studies in the area of medical technology invention. Primary design history files were recorded with a few semi-structured interviews of stakeholders from distinct domains.

Committee: Paul Zender MFA (Committee Chair); Mary Privitera MDesign (Committee Member); Craig Vogel MD (Committee Member) Subjects: Design

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2009, Art

This research explores a new methodology for idea-generation with multi-disciplinary design teams demonstrating alternative ideation techniques and brainstorming facilitation. Innovators may use this methodology to enhance their company's enthusiasm toward a project, link and generate different ideas together, or train newcomers in a team-building exercise. Researchers can use this dynamic moderator approach that involves careful timing to conduct a compact brainstorming session. Design educators may challenge their teaching styles with various parts of this methodology to encourage their students to practice thinking more broadly and gathering out-of-the-box ideas into one narrative by using the compiled, tested techniques in this study. Current idea-generation methods range from traditional methods such as focus groups, to non-traditional social networking platforms such as GUNGEN used in Japan. However, little to no information details an approach that leverages a combination of social networking channels such as wiki communities to co-create with design teams, while combining generative tools and free association for storytelling during the pre-design phase. Six separate workshops were facilitated at the respective job sites of the participants. Each group was comprised of six to eight professionals screened and recruited through a contact person who also participated in the hour-long ideation workshop. A total of twenty-nine participants tested the methodology. The results reveal novel associations with mundane objects, which add imagination and cohesion to these objects when formulated into storytelling. As a vehicle for collaborative ideation, this methodology is intended for group motivation and idea enhancement in a cost-effective way. It is aimed to benefit those who are thought leaders, and regularly work with ideas to innovate, manage, strategize, educate, moderate, research, and design, without the time or money to go on a creative retreat. A qua (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: R. Brian Stone (Advisor); Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders PhD (Committee Member); James W. Arnold (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education; Business Community; Communication; Fine Arts; Higher Education; Management; Social Psychology; Teaching

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2020, Leadership and Change

Global Virtual Teams (GVTs) enable organizations to become more flexible, and to adapt and react to turbulent, complex and dynamic environments. These teams span boundaries such as space, time, and geography, working collaboratively to achieve a shared purpose. Due to their reliance on technology for communication, knowledge sharing, and project management, structural and nonstructural components of their design must exist to enable these teams to exist and flourish at the edge of innovation. The human experience of working in virtual teams remains insufficiently observed, yet crucial to their sustainability. This dissertation study employed an exploratory sequential mixed methods design to provide insights into the experience of working as a member or leader on a GVT. In phase one, a theoretical framework was developed to identify themes and sub-themes that emerged from 21 interviews with GVT practitioners from seven nations and multiple time zones across many sectors. The data revealed that experiences of working on a GVT are best expressed by four major themes: team design (both structural and nonstructural) components, cross-cultural communication, human dynamics, and technology. One meta-theme emerged, adaptability, which is well supported by the chosen guiding theoretical framework, adaptive structuration theory (AST), as well as extant research. The results of phase one informed development of a survey instrument; a pilot test of this instrument showed promise for future validation of a scale that accurately depicts the experiences of working on a GVT. The current findings support practical applications toward better understanding team functioning, essential human needs, and best practices for team awareness and functioning. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/.

Committee: Jon Wergin PhD (Committee Chair); Aqeel Tirmizi PhD (Committee Member); Muriel Scott PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Management; Organization Theory; Organizational Behavior; Social Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2019, Management

As digital technologies transform the economy, more teams than ever before are developing digital products in environments that are dynamic and unfamiliar to them. A digital product team typically does not a priori possess all the knowledge required to appropriately interpret and respond to its environment. Therefore, the team's ability to learn fast and continuously—to acquire as-required new knowledge and change cognition and action as a result—becomes critical to its success. Relative to traditional new product development (NPD), digital NPD is idiosyncratic, and consequently, team learning in digital NPD is different from team learning in traditional NPD. This research inquiry aims to develop a preliminary understanding of the emerging and poorly understood socio-technical phenomenon of team learning in digital NPD. The inquiry frames learning as a technology-constituted process and uses an unorthodox mixed methods research design—consisting of concurrent qualitative and quantitative studies that partially inform a third design science study—in order to explore three key facets of the multi-level phenomenon. Each study examines a different facet, is situated at a different level, and characterizes a different learning process mechanism. Meta-inferences are then inductively and abductively derived to provide a more generalized understanding of the phenomenon. Study 1 uses constructivist grounded theory development to discover an individual-level process mechanism called senseshaping used by the NPD team's product manager to craft a team response to a trigger event. Study 2 uses structural equation modeling to characterize the effects of the popular team-level design thinking mechanism used by the NPD team to learn and develop new products. Study 3 uses design science research methodology to develop and evaluate a technology-constituted team-level process mechanism called the Product-Assisted-Learning (PAL) Loop that enables learning from product feedback. Inte (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kalle Lyytinen PhD (Committee Chair); Youngjin Yoo PhD (Committee Member); Nicholas Berente PhD (Committee Member); Nitin Joglekar PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration; Design; Information Systems; Management; Marketing; Organizational Behavior; Social Structure; Systems Design; Technology

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Wright State University, 2018, Human Factors and Industrial/Organizational Psychology PhD

Human-human communication is a coordinated dance (Clark, 1996) that requires each participant to consider the other participants. The majority of this coordination centers on the conversational grounding process that develops and maintains the common ground, or shared understanding between the individuals (Clark and Schaefer, 1989). Conversational grounding is also a crucial process for human-computer interaction using language-based methods, such as spoken dialogue systems. Previous work has tied grounding processes to the performance outcomes in collaborative tasks (Reitter and Moore, 2014; Gergle et al., 2013, 2004; Clark and Krych, 2004), making it a high priority for increasing capabilities of spoken dialogue systems. The model of grounding for human-computer interaction should be informed by human-human dialogue. However, the processes involved in human-human grounding are under dispute within the research community. Three models have been proposed: alignment, a simple model that has been influential on dialogue system development, interpersonal synergy, an automatic coordination emerging from interaction, and audience design, a strategic interaction based on intentional coordination. Interpersonal synergy and audience design are two different types of coordination models. Previously, only one study has tested both the alignment and coordination models simultaneously. Fusaroli and Tylen (2016) introduced communication models based on recurrence quantification analysis to model the amount of repetition between speakers. The current research extended their models to differentiate between the types of coordination. Throughout, the current research applied Fusaroli and Tylen's methods to richer stimuli/tasks that generate longer dialogues with larger vocabulary and more influences on performance outcomes. Through analysis of four different dialogue tasks, the current work also examined how common ground processes change as a function of the task characteri (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Valerie L. Shalin Ph.D. (Advisor); Scott N. J. Watamaniuk Ph.D. (Committee Member); Ion Juvina Ph.D. (Committee Member); William S. Horton Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Experimental Psychology; Psychology

MDES, University of Cincinnati, 2016, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Design

User experience (UX) designers who are joining a multidisciplinary product development team might face different collaboration challenges since the field user experience is relatively a new term and there is an ambiguity with UX designers' proficiencies, skills and abilities. In this thesis I have done a literature review on UX design process and successful collaboration criteria and addressed the challenges by two methods. One is a case study in which I was the UX designer. The project was about designing a web-based application in a multidisciplinary team at Bioinformatics department at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC). The second method was interviewing my teammates at the same project in order to find out their experience in this collaboration. Based on my findings I have developed five guidelines for UX designer to overcome collaboration challenges. These guidelines are: 1-

Committee: Steven Doehler M.A. (Committee Chair); Gerald Michaud M.A. (Committee Member); Craig Vogel M.I.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Design

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2015, Management

Although difficult, complicated, and sometimes discouraging, collaboration is recognized as a viable approach for addressing uncertain, complex and wicked problems. Collaborations can attract resources and increase efficiency, facilitate visions of mutual benefit that can ignite common desires of partners to work across and within sectors, and create shared feelings of responsibility. Collaboration can also promote conceptualized synergy, the sense that something will “be achieved that could not have been attained by any of the organizations acting alone” (Huxham, 2003). However, previous inquiries into the problems encountered in collaborations have not solved an important question: How to enable successful collaboration? Through exploratory sequential mixed-methods research conducted in three empirical studies, I discover how interorganizational collaborations can overcome barriers to innovate and rejuvenate communities and understand the factors and antecedents that influence successful collaboration. In the first study (Chapter 2), I use a grounded theory approach to identify the factors involved in successful collaboration. My interviews with leaders in affordable housing cross-sector collaborations revealed most collaborations for affordable housing encounter a common set of obstacles: funding, partnering, community, and/or government. Key findings suggest leaders of successful collaborations exhibit heightened emotional and social competencies, take actions intended to create a better future, remain mission-focused, and continuously redesign to meet ongoing challenges. Further, successful collaborations were innovative—creating solutions that rejuvenated their communities. To confirm and validate the findings in the first study, I propose a theoretical model emerging from the qualitative research, designed and empirically tested through a survey of 452 leaders and managers participating in ongoing or recently completed interorganizational collaborations (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Tony Lingham (Committee Chair); Bonnie Richley (Committee Member); Mary Dolansky (Committee Member); James Gaskin (Committee Member) Subjects: Management