WHAT YOU CAN GET FROM 48 HOURS: The Future of Design Leadership

Steve Visser / Cheryl Zhenyu Qian / Victor Yingjie Chen Purdue University

svisser@purdue.edu / qianz@purdue.edu / chen489@purdue.edu

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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