Modelling Expertise of Temporary Design Teams

This paper proposes a model of expertise of temporary design teams. We start by outlining a situated view of expertise as being grounded in individual experience, which emphasises its applicability and teleology. We use the construct of a computational agent to model the individual expert. We then show the advantages of the function-behaviour-structure (FBS) schema to represent the knowledge of a situated agent, which includes its knowledge about other agents. The ability of an agent to construct knowledge about the behaviour and parts of the knowledge of other agents has been found to be needed to allow social interaction among agents. Based on individual agents and their FBS views of one another, we then develop a model of expertise of temporary design teams that emerges from the interaction of individual experts. This bottom-up model is sensitive to changes in the composition of the team: some experts might leave the team while others join. However, the team members can usually establish the expertise of the new team without much effort as they can build upon their generalised knowledge gained from previously working in similar teams. We claim that our model provides a better understanding of team expertise and a basis for computational simulations of design teams.