“Why should I care?”: Understanding technology developers’ design mindsets in relation to prospective work design

ABSTRACT

Technology changes human work dramatically, but technology development rarely includes an explicit consideration of prospective work design. In order to better understand the challenges raised by prospective work design, it has been suggested in recent research to turn to technology developers’ conception of their own work as designers, that is their design mindset. Accordingly, we set out to explore technology developers’ design mindsets in the context of a large interdisciplinary research centre for the development of new technologies in architecture, engineering, and construction. Based on two waves of interviews (N = 32) spanning 1.5 years with researchers of that centre, we developed a framework for describing and assessing design mindsets along four dimensions: focus of own work, consideration of technology users, relevance of interdisciplinary collaboration, envisioned impact. These dimensions capture different aspects of what we termed holistic and impact-aware design mindsets. We found that prospective work design was generally not an explicit part of technology developers’ design mindsets, even though work design considerations were mentioned, for instance in relation to user involvement in the design process. We observed that design mindsets and developers’ professional identity might be related, as holistic and impact-aware mindsets were more often expressed by individuals who considered multiple disciplines to be part of their professional identity. We discuss these findings in relation to prerequisites for successful integration of prospective work design into technology development.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology development
• prospective work design
• interdisciplinary collaboration
• holistic and impact-aware design mindset
• professional identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use the term “demonstrator” project with reference to the technology readiness level (TRL) as indicated on the NASA website for the AEC sector. Demonstrator projects comply with TRL 6 or TRL 7. TRL 6 consist of “prototyping implementations on full-scale realistic problems with partially integrated existing system”; TRL 7 refers to “system prototyping in operational environment with system at or near scale of the operational system, with most function available for demonstration and test”. Architectural demonstrators facilitate the transition from research into a technically mature architectural application regardless of market constraints (Graser et al., 2020).

2. Most interviewees are non-native English speakers, and quotations from the interviews are provided verbatim. We refrained from subjecting them to English language editing for the sake of authenticity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant number 51NF40-182887.