“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

There is general agreement that today’s emerging technologies will significantly impact the future of human work (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014; Cascio & Montealegre, 2016; Faraj & Pachidi, 2021; Parker & Grote, 2022). Concerns have been raised that these changes will be driven by narrow technological and economic considerations and will engender job losses and reduce the quality of remaining jobs (Bailey, 2022; Berkers et al., 2022; Kellogg et al., 2020; Parker & Grote, 2022). Correspondingly, there is high demand for a more comprehensive understanding of how technological development can be steered towards encompassing prospective work design – that is the systematic creation of well-designed jobs as part of the changes induced by new technologies so that effective performance and human well-being can be promoted (Clegg, 2000; Corbett, 1985; Grote et al., 2000; Parker et al., 2017; Waterson et al., 2015). However, implementing prospective work design during technology development remains difficult despite many decades of research into human-centred design approaches (Dul et al., 2012; Grote, 2014; Parker & Grote, 2022; Waterson et al., 2015). Technology developers often lack the required knowledge and interdisciplinary collaboration with work design experts is rare. Moreover, the primary goal of technological innovation usually is to enhance efficiency, competitive advantage and economic success, with human-centred design being a secondary concern (Berkers et al., 2022; Dul & Neumann, 2009; Norman & Euchner, 2023). In our study, we followed recent research on how technology developers’ attitudes and beliefs related to their own work – that is, their design mindsets (Lavrsen et al., 2023) – affect the design and implementation of technology (Gray, 2016; Gray et al., 2020; Hagtvedt, 2019; Lifshitz-Assaf, 2018; Myers, 2023). We were particularly interested in examining whether technology developers’ design mindsets included an understanding of and interest in prospective work design and what conditions might be conducive to having such a more integrative mindset. As there is no generally accepted way of assessing design mindsets (Lavrsen et al., 2023; Mejía et al., 2022), our research also aimed to develop a framework that would allow to systematically describe and compare design mindsets. Thus, we sought to answer three questions: (1) How can design mindsets be described and compared within a common framework? (2) Do technology developers’ design mindsets include a concern for prospective work design? (3) If a concern for prospective work design can be found, what might be conditions that foster such a concern?

To address these questions, we took a qualitative approach that allowed us to explore how technology developers comprehend their own work and its impact, especially the impact on the work of users of the new technology. We conducted our study in a large research centre for digital fabrication (DFAB) in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) domain. This setting allowed us to examine design mindsets during early-phase technology development in a very interdisciplinary and applied research domain. We assumed that such a setting might be conducive to the development of more integrative design mindsets, especially as many of the new technological systems were intended for use in the researchers’ own professional domains, such as architecture and structural engineering. By accompanying the technology developers over more than two years, we were able to gain a deep understanding of their work and of how they themselves comprehended their work and its impact. In a subsequent phase of the research centre’s activities, this knowledge will be used to design tools and interventions to systematically foster prospective work design.

Our study contributes to work design research in a number of significant ways. First, by engaging in a dialogue with technology developers about their attitudes, beliefs and goals for their own work, we contribute to a more fine-grained understanding of why prospective work design is hard to implement and what might be necessary for it to become an integral part of technology design. Second, we go beyond the general call for fostering mindsets geared towards design (Gray, 2016; Lavrsen et al., 2023; Mejía et al., 2022) by proposing a framework containing several dimensions by which design mindsets can be described and assessed. The dimensions allow to capture technology developers’ concern for prospective work design, but they also indicate more broadly how holistic and impact-aware design mindsets are. Lastly, based on our observation that holistic and impact-aware design mindsets were related to technology developers expressing more interdisciplinary professional identities, we delineate possible fostering conditions for the emergence of holism and impact-awareness in mindsets.

Overall, our study aimed to provide knowledge on technology developers’ understanding of their own work as a basis for future interventions geared towards what Parker and Grote (2022, p. 1188; 1190) called intervention strategy B, that is the consideration of “human-centred principles in the development, design, and procurement of new technology”. Parker and Grote (2022) propose this strategy as a crucial complement to work design efforts during technology implementation and use to ensure that options for better work design do not get ruled out early on in technology development. By providing a framework for assessing design mindsets and an easy-to-use tool for technology developers to explore their own professional identity, our study contributes to the development of tools and interventions to facilitate prospective work design early in the technology development process when crucial decisions affecting the work design of future users are made.

Conceptual background

Prospective work design

As defined above, prospective work design aims to create well-designed jobs as part of the changes induced by new technologies (Clegg, 2000; Corbett, 1985; Grote et al., 2000; Parker et al., 2017; Waterson et al., 2015). In order to achieve good work design for future users of these technologies, decisions during technology development should be based on an integral understanding of how technology affects work processes and individuals’ jobs as developed in socio-technical systems theory (Cherns, 1976; Clegg, 2000; Pasmore et al., 1982; Trist & Bamforth, 1951). Such prospective work design goes beyond organizational activities aimed at (re)designing work, which are also future oriented and in that sense prospective. By considering technological choices made much earlier during technology development in light of their impact on job quality, effective performance and human well-being can be fostered more profoundly (Clegg, 2000; Waterson et al., 2015). To emphasize this more far-reaching future-oriented (re)design of existing and new jobs, we use the expression prospective work design as originally proposed by Corbett (1985).

Extant research has shown that prospective work design is rarely part of actual technology development efforts, resulting in poor job quality and sub-optimal individual and organizational performance once the technology gets implemented (Clegg, 2000; Leonardi, 2012; Parker & Grote, 2022). One recent example is provided by Berkers et al. (2022) who studied the impact of introducing robots on warehouse workers’ jobs. They found that job quality generally decreased based on lower task variety, cognitive demands, and autonomy. In all warehouses the decision to implement robots was mostly driven by economic and technological factors, and even when the importance of job quality was acknowledged, this usually did not result in appropriate prospective work design. However, Berkers et al. (2022) came across a few examples of workers engaging in job crafting to increase their autonomy, illustrating that there always remains some opportunity for human agency, even in highly technically constrained work processes (Leonardi, 2012; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). In view of the difficulties to introduce prospective work design into technology development, researchers have begun to pay more attention to the role of those individuals who have the power to influence work design. Parker et al. (2019) found that people who are explicitly charged with designing jobs for others, such as HR professionals, often rely on a very narrow understanding of efficiency and do not consider the quality of the resulting jobs in terms of characteristics such as job autonomy, task variety or learning opportunities. This study did not consider technology developers, but indicates that even people in roles closer to work design often neglect knowledge on what constitutes high quality jobs. Delving into the daily work experience of technology developers, Hagtvedt (2019) provided a fascinating account of how they lived up to their personal ethical standards by self-imposing constraints on their work to avoid negative consequences of the new technologies. For instance, one developer intentionally designed “clumsy assistants” that would require strong human involvement for making sensible decisions rather than being able to work autonomously. This study shows how technology developers may become more responsive to questions of work design for the users of their technology, and at the same time it shows how developers craft their own jobs to create more meaning for themselves. Similarly, Myers (2023) found that developers managed to address worker concerns in their designs, even against the interests of those workers’ managers. For instance, they set up a system for sending emails about operational problems which workers were required to report to their managers in a way that also allowed workers to communicate issues they themselves wanted solved.

These studies demonstrate the importance of comprehending how technology developers themselves conceptualize their work, as this will influence how they use their degrees of freedom in the design process. Each design decision affects the potential for creating high quality jobs for future users, while also reducing the degrees of freedom for future decisions. Once the technology is developed without consideration of prospective work design, the scope of action left to enhance work design is very limited. Therefore it is crucial to better understand technology developers’ beliefs and attitudes about design, that is their design mindsets, and to examine the role of prospective work design in these conceptions of their own work. This point we expand on next.

Design mindsets of technology developers

The study of mindsets has a long tradition in psychology as a way to capture core assumptions that help individuals to make sense of and interpret experiences, orient them to a particular set of expectations, attributions, and goals, and influence their behaviour (Crum et al., 2013; Dweck, 2008; Dweck & Yeager, 2019). In the context of technology development, the concept of mindset has been taken up to understand and shape design practices. Such design mindsets have been defined “as the beliefs and attitudes determining the interpretation and understanding of design situations and the choice of appropriate design strategies” (Lavrsen et al., 2023, p. 3356). Mejía et al. (2022) distinguished a design mindset from science or art mindsets, to stress the specificity of focusing on “how things ought to be” as a key component of design sciences (Simon, 1996, p. 4).

In our study, we wanted to explore the mindsets of technology developers to see whether, beyond having a general design orientation, there might also be variations in their goals and beliefs regarding desirable features of the new technologies they worked towards. Technology developers’ strong focus on the active future-making on the one hand, and the understanding of design as an integrative discipline on the other hand (Mejía et al., 2022), might offer the chance to integrate prospective work design as part of the design and development process.

As the concept of design mindset is quite new, no commonly accepted methods exist yet for its measurement. To date, most treatments of design mindsets have been conceptual, stressing in rather general terms the importance of learning more about design mindsets to shape design practice (Gray, 2016; Gray et al., 2020; Mejía et al., 2022). Only very recently, a survey instrument was developed by Lavrsen et al. (2023) that focuses on technology developers’ general approach to problem solving but does not include any assessment of how much developers are concerned with the impact of their work. We therefore followed a qualitative approach to describe design mindsets and to develop a framework that would allow us to assess and compare design mindsets in terms of the inclusion of prospective work design and more general concerns for the social impact of new technologies.

Methods

Research setting

The AEC sector has long been criticized for lagging behind in their adoption of digitization (Barbosa et al., 2017) as a way to address the stagnation in productivity (Chen et al., 2018), for their negative environmental impact (De Schutter et al., 2018), and for being an unattractive sector for young and skilled workers (Lavikka et al., 2018). The interdisciplinary research centre in which we conducted our study strives to push digital fabrication in AEC in view of these more general problems. Due to the explicitly stated goal of the centre to “maintain links to the potential users of research results in order to make a contribution to knowledge and technology transfer”, we considered it a promising context for studying design mindsets in relation to work design considerations.

Moreover, many projects in the research centre were organized around creating “demonstrators”¹ in the form of a small building or pavilion in which the viability of the emerging technologies could be showcased and first insights gained on how work processes might change. The technology was usually developed by researchers trained in professions from the AEC domain, including architects and structural engineers. This allowed us to expand on research by Parker et al. (2019) and investigate whether technology developers were more open to prospective work design when the new technology was to be employed by members of their own profession.

Both authors were associated with the research centre, contributing their expertise in work and organizational psychology and knowledge about prospective work design to the centre’s activities. However, in order to understand whether and how prospective work design formed part of the technology developers’ design mindsets, we intentionally chose a role as participant observers for our initial involvement in the centre.

Participants

We applied purposeful sampling (Suri, 2011) and selected fourteen out of a total of 31 projects conducted in the research centre. The projects represented two types of technology development: one type focused on software to be used by architects and structural engineers during the design phase of construction projects. The other type, so-called demonstrator projects, combined an extensive range of emerging technologies, as well as new materials and construction techniques, to create small-scale buildings for actual use, or pavilions for architecture exhibitions. Compared to some more fundamental research carried out in the centre, these two project types had clearer links to applications, which created a context conducive to discussions about the practical impact of the developed technologies, including a concern for prospective work design. We conducted interviews with between one and three researchers per project, from fourteen projects in total, at two points in time. Details on the interviewees are provided in Table 1.

Table 1. Sociodemographic characteristics of interviewees.

		University degrees
#	Country	Undergraduate	Postgraduate	Current position
1	Italy		Architecture and Structural Engineering	PhD researcher
2	Switzerland Argentina	Computer Science		Software engineer
3	Brazil	Civil Engineering	Structural Engineering	PhD researcher
4	Germany	Civil Engineering	Integrative Technologies and Architectural Design Research	PhD researcher
5	Venezuela	Architecture	Architecture	Assistant professor
6	USA	Mathematics	Mathematics	Software engineer
7	Austria	Architecture	Architecture	Post-doctoral researcher
8	Taiwan	Architecture	Integrative Technologies and Architectural Design Research	PhD researcher
9	Argentina	Architecture	Design and Computation	PhD researcher
10	USA	Architecture	Architecture and Structural Engineering	Senior researcher
11	Sweden	Architecture		Research assistant
12	France	Maths and Sciences	Civil Engineering and Construction	Post-doctoral researcher
13	USA	Civil Engineering	Architecture	Post-doctoral researcher
14	China/Great Britain	Architectural Studies	Architectural Studies (Design and Computation)	PhD researcher
15	Mexico	Civil Engineering	Architecture and Digital Fabrication	PhD researcher
16	Germany	Civil Engineering	Civil Engineering	PhD researcher
17	Italy		Building Engineering and Architecture	PhD researcher
18	Romania	Architecture	Architecture	Assistant professor

Note. n = 18 (n = 18, T1; n = 14, T2). Interviewees were on average 34.4 years old (SD = 3.8), 33% identified as female.

Data collection

Due to the limited theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationship between technology developers’ understanding of their own work and prospective work design, we chose an exploratory approach with semi-structured interviews as our main data source, combined with background information from document analysis, participatory observation of project meetings, and construction site visits.

We developed an interview protocol for each of the two rounds of semi-structured interviews, with the interview guideline for the second round building on insights gained during the first (see Appendix). The interviews at T1 (n = 18) took place from February to July 2020, and the follow-up interviews (T2; n = 14) were conducted from November to December 2021. Four researchers were unavailable for the second interview as their affiliation with the research centre had ended. The interviews were embedded in continuous contacts the first author had with researchers over the period of two years. As a result, the first author could gain a more in-depth understanding of the design and development processes the researchers were engaged with. The extent of engagement varied depending on the circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic between participatory observations of meetings, visits on construction sites and labs, informal conversations, and participation in (online) workshops and (online) meetings for the interdisciplinary research centre. This additional knowledge helped to contextualize the interviews.

The time gap of approximately 1.5 years between the interviews was chosen based on the overall structure of projects in the research centre. Our first interviews were conducted when researchers had been working in their respective projects for a little more than a year. At that point in time, the projects had gained the necessary traction and researchers were fully immersed in their development tasks. Accordingly, they had sufficient experience from which to draw in the interviews. Projects had to be finalized about two years later. By conducting the second interviews 1.5 years later, we met the researchers again when they were starting to wrap up their projects. We considered this a good opportunity to capture their reflections on the journey they had taken in their projects, at both a project and a personal level. The chosen timeframe also allowed us to step back from the field, reflect on our first iterations of data analysis, and start to form a clearer theoretical perspective for the continuation of data collection and analysis (Kvale, 1996).

We undertook the second round of interviews to tentatively explore whether mindsets change and what might be contributing factors. We could not build on any insights from the design mindset literature to provide a theoretical reasoning for a sensible timeframe within which to expect change. We therefore took the latest possible timepoint for T2 to still catch most researchers while also allowing the longest possible time for potential development and changes in mindsets to occur.

In the first interview round, questions were aimed at capturing the design mindset of the interviewees by asking about their personal attitudes and beliefs, the envisioned impact of the respective technology, considerations regarding future user involvement, and specifically how the new technology might or should change work processes and work design for future users. General questions regarding the interviewee’s role in the project and general setup were part of the interview as well. We also used the critical incident technique (Flanagan, 1954) to gain a more fine-grained insight into the design process and its challenges to uncover additional relevant aspects of the technology developers’ design mindset. We usually first asked questions about actual design choices, followed up by questions aimed at prompting the interviewees to explicitly reflect on the potential advantages and disadvantages of considering the effects on end-users’ jobs, or more specifically the intended interaction between the future user and the technology. We therefore aimed to assess both their design choices and their design mindsets. Not all questions were asked to everyone because we decided to refrain from asking certain follow-up questions when the answers to the initial questions had already revealed that work design, user participation, etc. were not part of the interviewees’ design considerations. The interviewer decided that insisting more on such aspects would have put the interviewee in an uncomfortable situation and might have threatened the trust created in the interview between the interviewer and interviewee.

In the first round we stopped after 18 interviews, considering data or code saturation – i.e., “having heard it all” (which, according to a methodological investigation by Hennink et al., 2017, is often reached after just nine interviews) – and inductive thematic or meaning saturation, or “having understood it all” (in Hennink et al.’s, 2017, study, this took between 16 and 24 interviews; see also Saunders et al., 2018). Moreover, the interviews covered all projects in the research centre that we had selected as particularly relevant for prospective work design. Therefore, we considered the 18 interviews sufficient as a basis for our analyses of technology developers’ design mindsets.

We analysed the interview data of T1 by applying qualitative content analysis and developed the interview guideline for T2 based on findings from T1 with special attention to “anomalies” (Sætre & Van de Ven, 2021) that might require to search for further theoretical lenses in line with an abductive approach (Thompson, 2022). The analyses of the T1 interviews indicated that design mindsets might be influenced by how researchers perceived their own professional role in the interdisciplinary collaborations their projects entailed. We therefore drew on extant literature on professional identities and interdisciplinary collaboration to inform our T2 interviews. Professional identity, that is an individual’s sense of belonging to a certain profession and their acceptance of expectations that come with a specific professional role (Abbott, 1988; Pratt et al., 2006), has been found to influence technology developers’ design choices in previous research (Gray et al., 2020; Lifshitz-Assaf, 2018). There is also growing evidence that interdisciplinary collaboration helps engineers and scientists to develop broader professional identities (Kastenhofer & Molyneux-Hodgson, 2021), for instance by exposing them to interdisciplinary educational projects or design studios (e.g., Fairburn et al., 2016; Gray et al., 2020; Hoope et al., 2019; McNair et al., 2008). This can create the aspiration to look for more holistic solutions to the problems they study (Gabelica & Fiore, 2013; Misra et al., 2009).

These insights along with the findings from our first round of interviews led us to include in the T2 interviews questions about the researchers’ professional identity and their perspectives on interdisciplinary collaboration. To help interviewees explore their own professional identity amid interdisciplinary collaborations, we adapted the single-item graphic scale developed by Shamir and Kark (2004) for assessing organizational identification. In our multi-disciplinary identification task, participants were asked to position circles representing the six technical disciplines (architecture, civil engineering, computer science, control systems engineering, materials science, and mechanical and robotics engineering) involved in the research centre in relation to a circle presenting their own professional identity “Me as a professional” (see Figure 1 for examples). Participants could change the designation of the disciplines or add new ones if desired. They could also indicate changes in identification over the course of the project and whether they anticipated future developments.

Figure 1. Multi-disciplinary identification task: three examples of representations of participants’ professional identity.

Note. Representation of professional identity: the degree of overlap of the transparent circles with the grey circle “me as a professional”. From left to right: 41-year-old male software engineer with a bachelor’s degree in computer science; 34-year-old female postdoctoral researcher with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, a master’s degree in architecture, and a PhD in robotics in architecture; 27-year-old male doctoral researcher with a bachelor’s degreee in civil engineering and a master’s degree in structural engineering.

All interviews were conducted by the first author in English. Interviews lasted from 48 to 95 minutes, with an average of 60 minutes. Informed consent was obtained from all interviewees and interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, resulting in 550 pages of interview transcripts and notes.

The first author also observed team meetings, prototyping sessions, and actual construction during building site visits, totalling 38 hours of observation. The observations served to contextualize the findings of the interviews and to understand how the development process in the different projects unfolded. These data also permitted the first author to check whether prospective work design considerations may have played a role in the development process without the technology developers being aware of them and stating them explicitly in the interviews. Official documents, such as annual reports, served as objective sources for tracking project progress. All fourteen projects studied were finished successfully or made appropriate progress during the study period, despite the exceptional circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data analysis

We followed an abductive thematic analysis approach (Thompson, 2022) using the MAXQDA qualitative analysis software. In our initial analysis of the T1 interviews, we coded all content that appeared to be related to interviewees’ design mindsets. Accordingly, we analysed all expressions of beliefs and attitudes related to goals and outcomes of technology development and the most appropriate design strategies. After several rounds of independent coding (King & Brooks, 2017) by the first author and a research assistant, three dimensions were identified to describe interviewees’ design mindsets: focus of own work, consideration of technology users, and envisioned impact. After the analysis of the T2 interviews based on these three dimensions, relevance of interdisciplinary collaboration was identified as a fourth dimension. We re-analysed the data from T1 to include this fourth dimension also for those interviews. Each dimension was conceptualized as a continuum for which we defined the endpoints (see Figure 2) via an iterative process that built on the design and AEC literature (Gray, 2016; Iannaccone et al., 2014; Oesterreich & Teuteberg, 2016) and inductive coding and cross-case comparisons of both rounds of interviews. The endpoints of the dimensions were chosen to represent indications of what we termed low versus high holism and impact-awareness.

Figure 2. Dimensions of holistic and impact-aware design mindsets.

For further comparative analyses between interviewees within and across interview rounds, we assessed the overall degree of holism and impact-awareness expressed across the four dimensions by each interviewee at each time point. Generally, mentioning more dimensions and mentioning them in a more elaborated manner was taken as an indication of a more holistic and impact-aware design mindset. Assessments were compared and validated between the first author and a research assistant who both coded all interviews. Disagreements were resolved through open discussions until unanimous assessments were achieved. We also examined more specifically any indications of prospective work design being part of what interviewees described as their design mindsets. Due to the inductive iterative development process for the assessment of design mindset across the two rounds of interviews, we could not trace the development of all dimensions systematically for all interviewees. Generally, we took an increased number of dimensions considered, or a specific dimension being discussed in a more nuanced way by the interviewee as indication of development towards a more holistic and impact-aware design mindset at T2.

Subsequently, we assessed interviewees’ description of their professional identity in terms of the number of different disciplines they perceived as being close to themselves as professionals, thereby indicating more disciplinary versus more interdisciplinary professional identities. We could then relate our qualitative assessments of interviewees’ design mindsets to their expressed (inter)disciplinary professional identity. In our final analyses we looked for systematic relationships between design mindsets and professional identity.

Findings

In the following, we present the results from our analyses along the three research questions we posed.

A framework for describing and comparing design mindsets

From the interview data, we were able to identify four dimensions along which the design mindsets of the interviewees could be described and compared. The four dimensions were: Focus of own work, consideration of technology users, relevance of interdisciplinary collaboration, and envisioned impact. Each dimension reached from purely technical considerations to the reflection of and concern for social and societal effects of new technologies. Based on these four dimensions, we distinguished design mindsets along an overarching continuum of how holistic and impact-aware interviewees’ beliefs and attitudes regarding their own work were (see Figure 2).

For the first dimension, focus of own work, the low end was defined by interviewees expressing a technical focus, that is their ambition to master the intellectual challenges involved in technological innovation:

This is the really great challenge of architecture design, that there’s no efficient way of addressing this problem so far. That are the things that I really want to solve, and also that is what brings to this topic. (…) I think I want to solve it because no one has solved it. [chuckles] (#8, T1)²

The high end for focus of own work was defined by interviewees’ emphasis on the far-reaching possibilities that new technologies offer to society and specific societal groups, as for example in the following quote, women in developing countries:

My motivation for this project specifically is that I want to, what fascinates me is that through our advanced sophisticated design techniques, we can come up with a system that is simple and that results in a smart outcome but it’s so simple that it can be used for people in developing countries and especially for women also because it’s like light labour and I was really having this, supporting female, women in the world idea in the back of my head.

(#4, T1)

The low end of the second dimension, consideration of technology users, was defined by not considering users at all:

“I needed that to do my research. Whether people will use this in the future or not. (…) How it can be used for other types of research I honestly don’t know because it’s something very, very specific.

(#10, T1)

The high end was defined by the active inclusion of future users as an inherent part of design considerations from the conceptual phase onwards:

There was already this question of how much did you give to the user. I was already aware of it. At the beginning of my PhD, the question was, “Who is my work for?” It should be high level, low level, and at some point, I thought that it should actually be both. It needs to have twice as much. It’s more doing both in an efficient and smart way to provide this. That’s the philosophy at my research group, where you want your colleagues to be able to use it, or actually carry it on further, and be able to share it with architects and engineers from practice who are not familiar with most of it. It was not maybe phrased explicitly, I think, but it naturally evolved to this.

(#12, T1)

The low end of the third dimension, relevance of interdisciplinary collaboration, was defined by expressions of interdisciplinary collaboration being relevant for solving technical problems in one’s own project at best, while at the high end of this dimension, interviewees reasoned that interdisciplinary collaboration was crucial to advance AEC industry and to close the research-practice gap.

I think that contributing to (the computational framework) was, in a way, contributing to this larger, more ambitious effort on opening and blurring boundaries between industry and academia on the one hand, and also between the three, architecture, engineering, and construction sectors. (#15, T1)

The envisioned impact of the technologies developed was the fourth dimension of design mindsets, where the low end was defined by a limited, technology-focused reflection of impact as illustrated by this quote:

“(The computational framework is) supposed to facilitate communication between researchers so they can pass easily these programmatic manipulations of 3D structures that they might want to be collaborating on” (#6, T1).

The high end of the dimension was defined by imagining potential consequences of the newly developed technologies for industry and society overall. In the following quote, making a positive contribution to society is even seen as an overarching guiding principle by the interviewee:

To me, it’s (what) makes the highest impact or the highest contribution to improve people’s lives. That’s what I would care the most about. When assessing opportunities, I would think of, okay, if I do this, what would be the repercussions to society? That’s one thing I always think is that if it’s feasible, economically viable in terms of the resources I would have at the time, not only financial but also it could mean time, I would look into that as well. The overarching principle to me would always be why would I care if it doesn’t make an impact, a positive contribution to society at large?

(#15, T1)

Assessment of technology developers’ design mindsets

In order to assess and compare interviewees’ design mindsets, we analysed statements pertaining to the four dimensions and where they could be positioned on those dimensions. This analysis served as a basis for an overall evaluation of how holistic and impact-aware an interviewee’s design mindset was. This qualitative evaluation was arrived at in a recursive process between the first author and a research assistant as described in more detail in the methods section.

At T1, we could discern initial signs of holistic and impact-aware design mindsets among the developers in most projects. We identified four researchers that already expressed a pronounced holistic and impact-aware design mindset at that stage. They were members of the two demonstrator projects, and they were all driven by socio-technical concerns and valued interdisciplinary collaboration. They considered the role of future users from the beginning and reflected on the envisioned impact for AEC industry and society at large.

At T2, the expression of holistic and impact-aware design mindsets by interviewees either increased or plateaued at a medium to high level – with one exception where we found less indications of holism and impact-awareness at T2. In this one case, the interviewee was quite concerned with the social impact of his work at T1, but over the course of his project found that he could not manage the added complexity created by social impact considerations. This experience led him to prefer a more sequential approach where impact considerations would be introduced at a later stage in the development.

One example of a major change towards a more holistic and impact-aware design mindset was observed in interviewee #9 who worked in a demonstrator project and had refocused the project from an emphasis on gaining an exhaustive understanding of all technical components to an integrated building approach:

Since the other interview, the project evolved in terms of really understanding the two parts of this project, that is the technique per se, but also what I would call the pipeline. How do you design and build with this? This particular project has a connection, or it tries to have a strong connection between the design and the construction part. (…) It’s a way of building. How do you design and build? It’s a whole workflow and is not separable so you cannot design something that you don’t know how to control, but also you cannot build with this without being very aware of the design because you might have to change it on the way. It’s this adaptive part, design, and construction, they’re very linked, it’s very important.

(#9, T2)

This interviewee acknowledged the creation of a new workflow and stressed the importance of adaptivity and connectedness between design and construction. Although the consequences for existing work processes were not further elaborated, there was an awareness that the emerging technology is not an isolated product, but rather a process.

While we could distinguish attitudes and beliefs reflecting different degrees of holism and impact-awareness in interviewees’ design mindsets, there were only tentative indications of a specific concern for prospective work design as in the example above. By considering technology users and reflecting on and caring about broader social impact, a link can be made to considerations of the work design of future users of the technology, but this link was rarely made explicit by interviewees. By asking more directly about challenges and opportunities for prospective work design in the first round of interviews, we learned that for some interviewees human users were not part of the picture at all because their aim was full automation.

Then, the vision that I have is that this technology will be used on-site autonomously. There will be a minimal amount of workers tending to these machines. The entire process from factory to building would be rather autonomous. Someone to drive a truck with building components and bring a few robots with a set of these tools, and they would assemble the house with minimum supervision. This whole thing is still fantasy.

(#14, T1)

For others, the opposite was the case. They felt human work would not be impacted because the technology they were developing would never become sufficiently reliable and robust to be employed in real-world contexts. Generally, thinking about future users happened mostly in relation to the design of user interfaces; the more fundamental question of how tasks should be allocated between technology and human workers rarely surfaced. Also, interviewees worried about the increasing complexity of their projects if impact on future users were to be considered more fully. Nevertheless, some interviewees saw the necessity to consider such impact early on to increase the acceptance of the developed technologies. The following quote is one of the rare examples of prospective work design being explicitly mentioned:

If the workers reject the technology, then no contractor will take the technology and it’ll never be implemented. You have to develop it in a way that they recognize that their job will be higher quality and they won’t feel like their job will be threatened. What I think is exciting is when you think about interfaces, you can also think about giving them information that they wouldn’t have had available to them otherwise. (…) You have to show them that their quality of work is increasing, the tedious tasks we can get rid of, their job would be somewhat more enjoyable. You have to ask them what aspects of their job do they enjoy and how do they have more time for that, and how do we implement technology that increases their quality of work.

(#13, T1)

In another such example a facilitating factor for reflecting on prospective work design was the proximity of the interviewee’s professional field to the work domain of future users:

I’m a structural engineer, and I worked just for one year in practice. I know how it works. I’m not an architect, but I would say I’m developing the tool for people like me, so that actually helps. It’s not as if I’m a software developer developing a tool for architects, I’m a structural designer developing a tool for the other structural designers, so I was with that.

(#1, T1)

Fostering holistic and impact-aware design mindsets: The relevance of interdisciplinary professional identity

In order to better understand how design mindsets evolved we explored whether the type of project (developing a computational system versus a physical demonstrator) and the maturity of projects were related to different degrees of holistic and impact-aware design mindsets. Generally, interviewees in projects aiming for a physical demonstrator as output expressed a more holistic and impact-aware mindset at T1, but by T2 these differences had mostly vanished. Also, the maturity of projects did not seem to have a systematic and lasting effect, as there were some interviewees that expressed holistic and impact-aware design mindsets from the onset of their projects as mentioned earlier. However, we found that attitudes towards interdisciplinary collaboration as expressed in a more interdisciplinary professional identity mattered. We turn to these findings now.

Following discussions about the relevance of professional identity in interdisciplinary contexts during the T1 interviews, we addressed professional identity directly in T2. To triangulate the interviewees’ accounts of their professional identity, we used their responses to the question “How do you introduce yourself in a project to other people so that they know what to expect from you?” and the results of the multi-disciplinary identification task. Apart from one interviewee who selected a single discipline, interviewees predominantly depicted their professional identity using three to six of the suggested disciplines. Many interviewees chose the combination of the four disciplines architecture, computer science, fabrication design, and structural engineering. Explaining this choice, one interviewee explicitly stated that this combination is a precondition to creating a positive overall impact. “I like this combination a lot. I think it’s very powerful because it’s really the way I see how we should develop projects in a meaningful way for a better future and better designs” (#4, T2). Despite these commonalties, the professional identity representations were unique for each interviewee in terms of the distances and overlaps between disciplines in relation to themselves.

We then examined the expressed professional identities in relation to the design mindsets of the respective interviewees. We found a tentative connection between interdisciplinary professional identities and holistic and impact-aware design mindsets as illustrated by the following examples. Interviewee #9, whose design mindset evolved from a low degree of holistic and impact awareness at T1 to a high degree at T2, added all other disciplines to their core discipline of architecture to describe their professional identity. Interviewee #13, who also selected all six disciplines to depict their professional identity, provided some insight into the educational journey that can lead technology developers to embrace a more interdisciplinary professional identity and a holistic and impact-aware design mindset:

But if you look behind the real expertise of everyone, you have a lot of people that have these mixed backgrounds, that were let’s say self-initiated because someone’s self-taught in computer science, even though (they formally) are architects. I got a degree in one thing and then I studied something else there’s no incentive to do that. It’s complex, because then you have to relearn all the fundamental courses for other subjects, but I think ultimately like progress in this field, necessitates those kinds of people.

(#13, T2)

Some interviewees described their professional identity not by a combination of individual disciplines but expressed a more holistic view of digital fabrication as its own discipline. These interviewees also tended to have a highly holistic impact-aware design mindset, as, for example, interviewee #4 who stressed the importance of bringing technical and social aspects together already at T1:

The idea was to integrate basically all these aspects from the beginning to really consider the design, the structural design, and application design into one thing, that’s considered from the beginning, and through this approach, to hopefully find more solutions that are more efficient in all terms. (#4, T1)

Lastly, some interviewees who mentioned that they envisioned their professional identity to include more disciplines in the future, tended to express a higher degree of holism and impact awareness at T2 compared to T1. It appeared that these interviewees realized that through the changes in their design mindsets they should push their own professional development by acquiring knowledge from additional disciplines in order to successfully enact more holistic and impact-aware design considerations.

Before joining the research cluster, I would say I didn’t have them (these disciplines) on my radar at all. It’s thanks to the work here that I became more familiarized with these things, and I would be curious to explore them a bit more.

(#11, T2)

This development is consistent with the highly interdisciplinary nature of their day-to-day work and reflects how the interdisciplinary context permeated into interviewees’ self-conception as professionals.

Discussion

In our exploratory study, we aimed to examine how technology developers understand their own work as captured by their design mindsets. Specifically, we were interested to learn whether prospective work design might be part of these design mindsets. We also wanted to understand whether there might be particular conditions that helped to foster a concern for prospective work design in technology developers’ design mindsets. From a qualitative analysis of our interview data, we identified four dimensions that could be used to describe and compare the level of holism and impact-awareness in design mindsets: focus of own work, consideration of technology users, relevance of interdisciplinary collaboration, and envisioned impact. All dimensions were constructed to range from a purely technical understanding of technology development to a reflection of and concern for social factors involved in developing, implementing, and using technology. We found that in a few cases, interviewees explicitly included work design considerations when they were discussing the social impact of technology development. Such considerations were triggered, for instance, by more immediate involvement in construction during the demonstrator projects. However, overall, prospective work design was not a significant element of the interviewees’ design mindsets and many interviewees had no awareness of work design as a professional discipline. When asked directly about the importance of work design considerations, interviewees showed a positive attitude towards “keeping the human in the loop” (#13, T1), but grappled with the transfer of this approach to their research projects. Considering work design of future technology users was seen as very challenging and therefore most interviewees preferred to postpone such considerations to the implementation stage of new technologies.

While our initial objective was to reveal mechanisms that can foster design mindsets that help to realize prospective work design in early technology development, we came to understand that, in the research context we studied, even technology developers with a holistic and impact-aware design mindset struggled to relate their own work to changes in the design of others’ work. In our search for conditions that might facilitate the development of holistic and impact-aware design mindsets – and possibly also prospective work design – we found that technology developers’ conception of their own professional identity as interdisciplinary appeared to be a relevant factor. However, no firm conclusions can be drawn as we were not able to systematically trace changes in design mindsets and in professional identities. Trying to explain particular changes for individual interviewees’ remains speculative at best.

Overall, we were able to operationalize the concept of design mindset and to demonstrate how it can help to better understand technology developers’ attitudes and beliefs regarding their own work and the impact it has. We also showed the relevance of capturing technology developers’ professional identity in relation to different disciplines, as more interdisciplinary identities appeared to be linked to more holistic and impact-aware mindsets. Thereby, we open new avenues for research and practice aimed at facilitating the inclusion of prospective work design in early phases of technology development. We expand on specific theoretical and practical implications in the following.

Theoretical implications

With our study we open a new field of study for work design research by emphasizing the importance of understanding the work of technology developers and how they themselves perceive their work. In order to promote prospective work design during technology development, it is paramount to see the related challenges and opportunities through the eyes of technology developers. Only then measures can be devised to help integrate work design consideration into technological innovation. We have built on recent research that has proposed the concept of design mindset as key to capturing the attitudes and beliefs underlying technology developers’ work practices (Gray, 2016; Gray et al., 2020; Lavrsen et al., 2023; Mejía et al., 2022). Thereby, we also followed a call by Parker and Grote (2022) who suggested that learning more about the mindsets of different stakeholders in technology development is needed to change development practices towards more prospective work design.

To date, the relevance of design mindsets beyond the mere application of design methods has been emphasized in the User Experience (UX) literature (Gray, 2016). Our findings indicate that holistic and impact-aware design mindsets may also facilitate the integration of human-centred concerns into early technology development where specific user interfaces have not yet been defined. We consider this crucial for advancing prospective work design, as impact awareness needs to be strengthened early on to ensure that design decisions take full advantage of opportunities for maintaining or even enhancing job quality (Parker & Grote, 2022).

Furthermore, our study suggests a relation between holistic and impact-aware design mindsets and interdisciplinary professional identities. This finding aligns with and expands existing research that has demonstrated the importance of exposing engineers to interdisciplinary contexts to create more concern for social impact (Felt et al., 2013; Mitrany & Stokols, 2005). Our results provide tentative evidence that interdisciplinary collaboration can foster impact awareness, but it appears that more specific guidance is needed to get technology development teams to act on that awareness, especially regarding issues of work design. We could also show how the experience of working in interdisciplinary projects challenged the researchers’ professional identity and the design principles shared in their professional communities. One fundamental barrier to successful interdisciplinary collaboration can be team members’ strong identification with their own discipline, which may lead them to only accept conceptual and methodological approaches that conform to those in their scientific field (Felt et al., 2013; Knorr-Cetina, 1999). Once collaboration is established that crosses disciplinary boundaries, individuals’ established professional identities are likely to become unsettled (Bock von Wülfingen, 2021; Felt et al., 2013), which we also observed in our study. The continued exposure to interdisciplinary collaboration encourages the emergence of new professional identities which embrace more integral perspectives on solving problems with new technologies. In turn, these new identities help interdisciplinary teams to take better advantage of their members’ diverse knowledge.

Lastly, our findings provide a fresh look at the reasons for why existing methods used to promote prospective work design often do not prove effective in changing design practice (Challenger et al., 2013; Dul et al., 2012; Grote, 2023; Parker & Grote, 2022). Reflecting on design mindsets and professional identity might be a crucial prerequisite for building common ground regarding the aims of technology development in design teams, which may increase the success of applying specific tools for prospective work design during the development process. Relatedly and in line with previous research (Parker & Jorritsma, 2021; Parker et al., 2019) our study shows that prospective work design is likely to benefit from explicitly encouraging developers to reflect on similarities between their own work and the new work systems they create for others.

Practical implications

Our study was motivated not only by exploring new conceptual avenues for promoting prospective work design, but also by preparing the ground for new approaches for prospective work design in practice. From our findings, tools can be developed to assess design mindsets and professional identities that can help technology developers reflect on and expand their design practices to include a concern for the job quality of users of their technologies. These new tools should be combined with existing tools for UX and design thinking (Brown, 2008; Gray, 2016) as well as methods from human factors and work design (Grote et al., 2000; Parker & Jorritsma, 2021; Waterson et al., 2002; Waterson et al., 2015). Thereby, technology development teams can be supported in building common ground for managing the extra complexity introduced by considerations of the job quality for future users and social impact more broadly (Clegg & Shepherd, 2007). In addition, tools developed from team research should be included to promote team reflexivity (Konradt et al., 2015) and to help teams make the most effective use of diverse knowledge in interdisciplinary teams (National Research Council, 2015; Salazar et al., 2012; Vogel et al., 2013). Ideally, the effectiveness of such tools would be tested by intervention studies first, as suggested as one avenue for future research below.

A complementary measure could be to define criteria based on prospective work design as part of formal project reviews. Such a measure might even be used at the level of funding agencies, thereby increasing its visibility and influence. However, such measures likely should be implemented only after a general awareness of the need for, and benefits of, holistic system design has been established. Otherwise resistance may be created, adding to the many failures of pushing for socio-technical innovation (Dul et al., 2012).

Limitations and future research

Our findings stem from one context in one country, which limits their generalizability. We chose the specific research centre due to its emphasis on the transferability of emerging technologies to industry, assuming that this might create favourable conditions for prospective work design. Surprisingly, even in this context which explicitly encouraged the researchers to consider the impact of the newly developed technologies and adapt project goals accordingly, we found little concern for the job quality of future technology users, thereby adding to existing literature on the manifold barriers to prospective work design (Challenger et al., 2013; Parker & Grote, 2022). The insights we gained on design mindsets and professional identity as important concepts for overcoming these barriers can inform future research in other contexts to test their broader validity. The framework we have developed to describe and assess design mindsets can serve as a starting point for such research. It will be important to see whether the dimensions we have identified as part of holistic and impact-aware design mindsets generalize to other contexts and how the framework might be expanded to more specifically capture a concern for prospective work design. Such research might again adopt a qualitative approach, but the framework could also be used to develop and validate a quantitative measure for design mindsets.

Combined with the multi-disciplinary identification task we used to assess professional identity, a quantitative measure of design mindsets would allow to gather data in larger and more diverse samples and to explore the relationship between design mindsets and professional identity more systematically. Such research would be important because due to our exploratory study design, we were not able to draw any conclusions about the strength or the temporal sequence of this relation. Also, it is to be noted that our role in the research centre we studied was defined as participant observer, meaning that we and with that the discipline of work and organizational psychology were not part of any of the project teams we studied. We made ourselves available to developers if they had questions about work design or other topics related to work and organizational psychology, but our expertise was rarely called upon. This setting was chosen deliberately because we wanted to study technology developers’ design mindsets and professional identity without imposing work design knowledge on them. However, future research should also examine settings where work and organizational psychology expertise is explicitly included as a relevant discipline in technology development teams.

Our findings could also be the basis for developing and testing interventions to foster prospective work design. Following initial assessments of design mindsets and professional identity as baseline measures, interventions might combine process-oriented tools to foster team reflexivity (e.g., Konradt et al., 2015) and content-oriented tools to expand developers’ knowledge about work design as prerequisites for making adequate design decisions (e.g., Boos et al., 2013; Parker et al., 2019; Waterson et al., 2002). Moreover, tools should be included that encourage developers to reflect on similarities between their own work and the new work systems they create for others (Parker & Jorritsma, 2021; Parker et al., 2019). It was surprising to us that even the architects and structural engineers who developed technologies for their own disciplines did rarely reflect on how professional practice and professionals’ jobs would or should change. Only when directly prompted in the interviews did they begin to explore this question. Accordingly, interventions aimed at promoting prospective work design should include tools that help technology developers linking their own experience at work with desirable work situations for the users of their technology.

Conclusion

Our results show that integrating work design considerations into early technology development remains a major challenge. We hope that our approach of studying people’s conception of themselves in relation to the technological innovations they aim for, may prove useful in devising better methods and contexts for prospective work design. We are confident that by shaping interdisciplinary collaboration during technology development towards promoting holistic and impact-aware design mindsets and interdisciplinary professional identities, successful socio-technical integration can gain ground.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

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

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.

Appendix

Interview guideline T1:

Table

Main question	Potential follow-up questions
1. What is the project you are working on?
	1.1. What is your role?
	1.2. What are your main tasks?
2. Why did you decide to work on this project?
	2.1. What motivated you to work on this project?
3. In your project, what is the new technology/technological development for you?
	3.1. The project as a whole, or some of the components you are working on?
4. How do you design a new technology?
	4.1. What aspects do you consider in the design process of a new technology?
	4.2. Can you give an example on how design decisions have been affected by these different aspects?
5. In the design process, how do you use the technology you are developing?
	5.1. How do your team/colleagues use the technology you are developing?
6. How is the technology you are working on going to be applied/used in the future?
	6.1. What role does the future use of the technology play in your work?
	6.2. Can the long-term use of the technology you are working on impact you in your daily work?
7. In the design process, do you consider how your technology is going to be used by humans?
	7.1. Why yes, why not? 7.2 Can you describe how you do that?
8. What are the advantages of considering the future users in the design process?
	8.1. Would you benefit from including the human earlier in the design process?
9. Can you think of disadvantages from thinking about the future users in the design process?
10. How should the human, as an individual be considered in the design process?
	10.1. Which point in the design process would you consider most appropriate to think about the interaction of the technology and the worker?
11. How can/should the end-user of the technology become part of the design process of the technology?
12. How should the organizational structure be considered in the design process?
	12.1. Which point in the design process would you consider most appropriate to think about the interaction of the technology and the organization?
13. In comparison to the currently applied technology, what problems could arise regarding the integration of the new technology in future work?
14. What was the most critical moment/part in the design?
15. Do you have something that you would like to add/share in the context of this interview? Who else would you recommend me to interview?

Interview guideline T2:

Table

Main question		Potential follow-up questions
1. What is the project you are working on? How has your project evolved since our last interview in (month/year)?
		1.1. Was the development according to plan or was it different? 1.1.1. If it was different, what were the reasons/factors that impacted the project’s development? 1.1.2. If it was according to plan, where are you now, and what are the next steps?
		1.2. (Success) What was critical for the project to succeed?/ (Failure) From your point of view what led to the delay/problems in the project completion/progress?
		1.3. In hindsight: what would you have done differently? Can you think of something you would have wished for to foster the project’s success?
		1.4. In the last interview we were talking about user feedback: What feedback did you get from people who applied your technology?
		1.5. Is the way that you think that the technology you are working on is going to be applied/used in the future, and by whom, still the same or has it changed? (Answer from last interview to refresh)
		1.6. Can you imagine how the results of your research may affect work processes in AEC (e.g., new or changed tasks for individuals, new forms of collaboration, new business models)?
2. Most digital fabrication projects are interdisciplinary by definition: How does interdisciplinarity relate to Digital Fabrication in general? Circle task 1: You can see six circles representing the six involved disciplines in the research centre. Please arrange these circles in a way so that they best represent their relationship within the research centre. Should there be other disciplines involved as well? If yes, please specify which.
	2.1 What is your take on interdisciplinary collaboration?
	Circle task 2: You can see six circles representing the six involved disciplines in the research centre. Please arrange these circles in a way so that they best represent their relationship within your project 2.2 What role does/did interdisciplinary collaboration play in this project?
	2.3 Are you satisfied with the degree of interdisciplinary collaboration? Please explain your answer.
	2.4. How would you like to see the relationship among these disciplines continue in the future?
3. How do you see yourself in relation to different disciplines within the research centre? Circle task 3: Please arrange these circles in a way so that they best represent yourself and your skills. Can you explain why you put the circles that way?
		3.1. Have you always seen yourself like this combination of disciplines, or has it changed? Past: When was the past? How long ago?
		3.2. How do you see yourself and your skills in the future? When starting a new project with new project partners, how would you introduce yourself?/(Alternative) Please try to describe your job to someone who is not familiar with Digital Fabrication.
		3.3 How do you make sure that others know where your strengths are?
4. What was the most critical part in the design?
5. Did the first/previous interview resonate in some way?
		5.1 Have there been moments when you thought of the interview/the topics that we talked about? If yes, can you think of an example?
		5.2 Did you talk with others (researchers, friends) about the topics of the interview?
6. Do you have something that you would like to add/share in the context of this interview?