Field Guide for Interpreting Engineering Team Behavior with Sensor Data

The design of complex systems is a challenge with many capabilities enabled by a recent generation of digital tools for modeling, simulation, and interaction. Relevant studies on teamwork from coordination science, learning, design, HCI, and serious games are briefly summarized. However, validation of resulting behavior and emergent outcomes given these much-needed new tools has been difficult. The recent availability of pervasive sensors may allow the creation of experiment platforms to increase empirical data from experiments, their scalability, and analyses towards reproducibility. This paper’s approach treats engineering teamwork as a sociotechnical system and proposes instrumentation of teamwork across problem, solution, and social spaces. A quasi-experiment was conducted, with experts in the maritime industry exploring options for transition to natural gas infrastructure and shipping. The experiment derives a narrative of the engineering teamwork both from ethnography and digital sensors to uncover teamwork behavior. Thus, this work integrates disparate data to create mapping rules from sensors to story. We find the approach promising for the generation of sensor-derived stories and the potential for deeper and scalable studies on engineering teamwork.