WHAT YOU CAN GET FROM 48 HOURS: The Future of Design Leadership
Steve Visser / Cheryl Zhenyu Qian / Victor Yingjie Chen Purdue University
[email protected] / [email protected] / [email protected]
Figure 1. Five marketing managers from Weber Grill (shown in front) challenged 50 students from Purdue University in the spring of 2012.
The students took on the challenge of improving the grilling experience in an intensive design weekend called 48-2-design.
1. INTRODUCTION
Industrial design is both an individual activity and a collaborative process. When individuals communicate and
work collaboratively toward a design solution, the process can be very rewarding to all involved. In educational
environments, such collaboration can serve as an excellent pedagogical tool and create a structure for exploring
design leadership strategies and find insights to help design teams in the future. In regular university course
settings, students are focused on building up individual skills and mastering problem solving techniques. Most
student experiences are individual or involve working in small teams. Students have few opportunities to
experience large group collaborations or short-term intensive design challenges and even fewer opportunities to
practice leadership in their teams to achieve the goals.
For the past six years, 50 students at the Purdue University have participated in the 48-2 design competition
every year. The event is part of the industrial design curriculum intended to let students experience collaborative
design in a timed design tasks. Since 2006, each year an industrial partner has kindly sponsored the competition.
The sponsor sets the design challenge and judges the final results. The students are organized into five teams of
10. The senior students are responsible for organizing and leading the event. Their tasks ranged from designing
team T-shirts, recruiting meal sponsors, managing the design process, arranging the task assignments, and
organizing the final presentation packages. Basically, they are expected to demonstrate their problem solving,
design, leadership, business, and social skills as a whole. Although 48 hours are short and the tasks are
extremely intensive, the teams produce impressive work, with smiles on their faces at the end. Each year the
groups deliver designs and concepts that fulfill the sponsor’s challenge. However, the true deliverable is
pedagogical, the underclassmen learn skills from their team members and the seniors gain practical leadership
experience, the competition prizes turn out to be less important.
This year, we started to use qualitative research methods to track, record, analyze, and interpret the collaboration
design process, taking place among student teams. Through data analysis, we have found that there are several
different communication and collaboration models among the teams. The most creative outcomes were not
necessarily produced from the team with the cleanest and most explicit structure. This paper will be a
presentation of the findings of the research on design leadership.
2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND OF STUDENT LEADERSHIP
Since the early 1990s, there has been increasing attention on college student leadership development. Many
trends converged in the last 15 years to support a renewed focus on developing critical leadership outcomes in
students, and this movement has only gained momentum in recent years as the emphasis on accountability for
learning has increased (Dugan and Komives 2007). Some of these trends include: the paradigm shift in
leadership theory and philosophy to relational and reciprocal models (Komives, Lucas, and McMahon 2006), the
growing emphasis in business and industry on teams and collaborative practices (Pearce and Conger 2002), and
the development of new leadership models for college students (Posner 2004). All of the these trends converge in
the form of an institutional, and societal, mandate that calls for institutions of higher education to purposefully
develop responsible leaders in different disciplines.
Based on a questionnaire study conducted with thousands of participants, Kouzes and Posner read and listened
to revealed similar patterns of action. They found that when leaders were at their personal best, they were:
challenging the process, inspiring a shared vision, enabling others to act, modeling the way, and encouraging the
heart (Kouzes and Posner 2005). This leadership practice model has been adapted for the college student
context to improve the education of student leadership from the curriculum development perspective (Hallinger
and Heck 2010)(Cress et al. 2001). However, student leadership was largely not studied from a theoretical
perspective. Especially in the context of design collaboration, there is limited literature dedicated to discuss the
educational strategies to foster student leadership for future design teams.
3. SETTINGS OF THE 48-2-DESIGN WEEKEND
Each year of the last six years students at Purdue University have participated in the 48-2-design weekend. The
students are given a challenge from a corporate sponsor at the beginning of the event on a Friday night at 6:00
PM. They have 48 hours to complete the challenge presented by the sponsor. The event ends on Sunday night at
6:00 PM. The students are divided into groups of approximately 10 students. Each group has three seniors who
serve as leaders and are responsible for ensuring the groups complete the challenge and do as good of a job as
possible. The teams are usually comprised of three juniors and four sophomores, and occasionally a graduate
student. The goals for the weekend are multifaceted. First, it is a chance for the students to learn how to be a
leader on a design project. This leadership will be the focus for senior students to develop. Second, we
encourage students to pass on design techniques and skills to the underclassmen and we are interested in
observing how skills are passed on. Additionally, it helps to build community and relationships between students
at different levels in the program. For all of the teams, they all were able to accomplish their tasks on time. But
the quality of work and life varied. For some teams with successful leadership and arrangement, each member
had a five-hour sleep every night. But some teams could barely get any sleep time during the 48 hours.
All the industrial design faculty members are actively involved in this event. They not only show up in the event
kickoff session and two review meetings with each group. Also, at least one faculty is available to solve urgent
problems from 8am to 12am during the 48 hours. Students are welcomed to talk to the professor on call at any
time in terms of their issues. All the professors are scheduled to meet with each team twice during the weekend.
The first meeting is on Saturday afternoon. The faculty listen to team members to introduce their concepts and
sketches, and help them to focus on several concepts for further development. After the final submission at 6pm
on Sunday, the faculty meet with each team again to discuss their experience of the competition. From their own
perspectives, seniors, juniors, and sophomores talked about the lesson learnt and the skills enhanced from the
event. Faculties also talked about what their observation of the team, and provide some instructions for
improvement.
This year Weber Grills sponsored the project. Five marketing executives participated in the kickoff session, and
each of them prepared a design brief. So this year each team had a different challenge to try to accomplish. At
the kickoff of the event the representatives from Weber introduced the brief and helped their team understand the
challenge. Additionally, the team from Weber prepared and brought a variety of grills with them and taught the
students how to grill a variety types of food. After the weekend was over, the seniors traveled to Weber’s
corporate headquarters and presented the results of the weekend to the president of the company along with
other product development leaders from Weber.
4. LEARERSHIP IN THREE TEAMS
This year each of the five groups were challenged to create eight concepts and then develop two Photoshop
renderings that show what the concept could look like. Each concept was presented on in a concept board with a
perspective drawing that explains the benefits of the concept. Prior to the weekend the seniors have to plan the
schedule for the weekend, design T-shirts for the team, and create a book template for a documentation of the
weekend. For this paper we followed three teams to understand their leadership structure. The teams are the
“Sketching Von Dorfmen”, the “Narwalls”, and the “Brobots”. We tried to track and record their design process and
progress with photos at different stages, we also video recorded the final design briefing sessions to gather their
opinions about the design experience.
4.1. PLAN OF THE SKETCHING VON DORFMEN
A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart developed as a production control tool in 1917 by Henry L. Gantt. The team
Sketching Von Dorfmen (Figure 2) in planning the weekend used a color-coded and tiled Gantt chart (Figure 3). In
their plan, students have a specific task for each hour. They have chosen to select tasks according to the skills of
the student members. Additionally, the group decided to periodically stop all work and bring the group together for
Group share times, indicated in red in the chart below. Also of note in the Sketching Von Dorfmen is the fact that
for the first six hours everyone had the same plan; research, individual ideation and group ideation. After that
initial start the members split into individually assigned tasks.
Figure 2. Logo and team members of the Sketching Von Dorfmen
Figure 3. 48 hour time scale of the Sketching Von Dorfmen
4.2. INSIGHTS FROM THE SKETCHING VON DORFMEN
Figure 4. Working session and final exit interview of the Sketching Von Dorfmen
During the exit interview at the end of the weekend the students were asked about the leadership of the weekend,
these are some of the comments captured from the video recordings that are related to Kouzes and Posner’s
leadership model (Kouzes and Posner 2005).
• Enable others to act: “Take the time to figure out what people can do and they will be so much happier
than if they are frustrated with something they cannot do well and feel worthless.”
• Model the way: “For organization it is sometimes necessary to stop all work and reflect on the concepts
narrow down to the best concepts, then expand on those.”
• Inspire a shared vision “Leaders let people know what their responsibilities are, let them know where they
stand and what the have to do.”
During the exit interview the seniors were also asked for wisdom they could pass down to the juniors who will lead
the following year, below are some of their comments. Most of them are about trust in people and encourage the
hearts to produce.
• “Sophomores are more useful than you think.”
• “Take the time at the beginning to teach new skills and people will contribute the whole time.”
• “Figure out what people like to do, because if they like what they are doing they will try harder”
• “Have trust in people and they will deliver. (Except the last hour)”
• “Use humor to dispense with tension when there are problems.”
• “Sophomores tend to feel that their skills are not good enough and therefore they feel their ideas are not
good enough. Pointing out good ideas regardless of the sketch quality helps people contribute and feel
free to share their ideas.”
• “Sophomores learn the design process by watching the upperclassmen.”
• “Juniors learn delegating and learning to let go of a concept and let someone else work on it.”
4.3. PLAN OF THE NARWALLS
Figure 5. Logo, team members, and Gantt chart of the Narwalls
The leaders of the team Narwalls chose to follow a leadership approach in which the whole group worked
together on the various phases and helped out with everything. Group unity was the critical factor in their opinion.
Since their team had 5 sophomores, they wanted them to learn the complete design process not just pieces of it.
Shown by Figure 5, all the stages were planned to be achieved by the whole team.
4.4. INSIGHT FROM THE NARWALLS
Figure 6. final exit interview of the Narwalls
Will tying everybody together slows down the process of collaborative development?
During the exit interview, the student members were asked about the leadership of the weekend, these are some
of the comments. It seems that people are quite satisfied with their productivity and the leadership of the team.
• “A very happy team”
• “Everyone has a job to do”
• “Everyone worked on everything”
The seniors were asked for wisdom they could pass down to the juniors who will lead the following year, below
are some of their comments from the video recordings.
• “Our goal as leaders is getting sophomores introduced to a more complete design process.”
• “Not assembly line focused everyone worked on all phases.”
4.5. PLAN OF THE DA BROBOTS
Figure 7. Team members and Gantt chart of the Da Brobots
The process the da Brobots leaders chose to follow was a looped process of identifying a concept then
completing that concept boards before moving on to the next concept. This process was called a pipeline
approach by one of the team members. It had the advantage of learning from completing one concept before
moving on to others. It also allowed the team to nail down a design and avoided reworking the same concept over
and over. Another advantage to this approach was being aware of where in the process the group was by the
number of concepts they had completed. Additionally, if a concept reached completion and was not up to par it
could be sent back for refinement. In this way the leaders became gatekeepers of the quality of the concepts.
4.6. INSIGHTS FROM THE DA BROBOTS
In the exit interview (Figure 8) the students led by da Brobots had this to say about the leadership.
• “The leaders were focused and made decisions”
• “Stopped the urge to rework a concept too much”
• “Pipeline approach once a good concept is developed it is pushed forward immediately”
• “If the managers found that the concept was not developed good enough, then it was sent back for
refinement.”
Figure 8. Working process and final exit interview of the Da Brobots
From analyzing the video recording data of the exit interview sessions, we found that juniors started to learn the
design leadership, and had got themselves mentally prepared for the future. Sophomores appeared to be the
most satisfied people since they have learned a lot of techniques from the collaboration process. While working
closely with junior and seniors, they were able to understand lots of tricks through “the over shoulder learning”.
5. OBSERVATION AND CONCLUSION
Through tracking the design practice and feedbacks of three teams Sketching Von Dorfmen, Narwalls, and Da
Brobots, we can observe three different leadership models. Sketching Von Dorfmen tried to match the skills of
individual team members to certain tasks and stop periodically for group share times. However, the leaders were
not actually familiar with each member’s capabilities and it took them a while to understand and “trust”
sophomores. Periodically stops helped them to get familiar with each other’s skills but also delayed the overall
progress. The Narwalls started from treating everybody fairly and trusting everybody’s skills without assigning
specific tasks to people. The team moved forward as a whole and anybody can pick up somebody else’s leftover
to continue. Luckily, the sophomore members in this team did have strong conceptualization, sketching, and
rendering skills to catch up with the juniors and seniors’ work. During the exit interview, this team has the most
relaxed and happy atmosphere and everybody was pretty satisfied with their work and members. A “risky”
approach that was focused on trusting others turned out to be smooth and pleasant. The da Brobots’s pipeline
approach heavily relied on the leaders to make decisions upon each step to whether or not moving forward. Such
an approach did control the overall quality. However, these three leaders didn’t get any sleep during the 48 hours
and were totally exhausted by the heavy workload. They also met some communication issues that they had to
consult with a faculty member about how to motivate their team members.
While comparing these three models with Kouzes and Posner’s leadership model (Kouzes and Posner 2005), we
found that most leaders are well-prepared for “challenging the process” and “modeling the way”. The Narwalls
chose to fully trust their lowerclassmen, “encourage the heart” and “inspire a shared vision”, and there is no need
to “enable others to act”. The Sketching Von Dorfmen started to recognize their members’ skills step by step,
build up the trust and inspire a shared vision with a time-consuming procedure. The Da Brobots focused on
“enabling others to act” and didn’t really try to inspire a shared vision among their members. Sophomores only
have limited skills to contribute, whether or not to trust their vision and work led to different leadership styles and
collaboration outcomes.
We tried to conduct our studies without interrupting the progress of the design competition. However, the data we
collected was quite limited and potentially biased (for example, members were not able to talk about their opinion
anonymously in the exit interviews). In next year’s 48-2 design weekend, we will share our findings from this
study, and collect more complete and trustworthy data from students’ collaboration practice to understand the
more effective leadership structures.
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