BOO: Behavior-oriented ontology to describe participant dynamics in collocated design meetings

Facilitating meetings is not an easy task. To assist the facilitator, we have been designing intelligent support systems, which can help contextual sensemaking, decision making and action. However, these systems are constructed based on behavioral models that provide guidelines to understand participant behaviors. This paper presents an ontology to describe participants’ behaviors in collaborative design meetings and rules that correlate them with the group’s acceptance of the final product. This ontology describes the group dynamics at collocated meetings, using verbal and non-verbal cues of attention shifts and attention maintenance as its basic constructs. The objective of creating this ontology was to better understand face-to-face meetings to eventually help meeting facilitators identify issues that may lead to dissatisfaction with the final product through behavioral cues. The ontology was derived through extensive analysis of a series of engineering design session videos. The design group was composed of experts with similar backgrounds, but working in different divisions of the same company. Different points of view were argued and decisions were made at the end of each meeting. After each meeting, participants were asked to asynchronously commit to the decisions made in the group. Our ontology can be used to identify the factors that lead to an undesired outcome, and now serves as a basis for a new project, which uses rules to support design meetings, improve final artifact acceptance and reduce rework. Our conclusions point out correlations between designers’ behaviors and future artifact acceptance and actions that interrupt or bring back group attention. The ontology was validated through application to other meeting situations. These findings may guide software developers in the creation of tools to support group design, and may be applied by an intelligent system.