1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 Lifting the Veil: Drawing Insights about Design Teams from a Cognitively-inspired Computational Model Christopher McComb, Jonathan Cagan, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Kenneth Kotovsky, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Corresponding Author: Jonathan Cagan Department of Mechanical Engineering Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Ave Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA cagan@cmu.edu Phone: (412) 268-3713 Fax: (412) 268-3348 Abstract Novel design methodologies are often evaluated through studies involving human designers, but such studies can incur a high personnel cost. It can also be difficult to isolate the effects of specific team or individual characteristics. This work introduces the Cognitively-Inspired Simulated Annealing Teams (CISAT) modeling framework, a platform for efficiently simulating and analyzing human design teams. The framework models a number of empirically demonstrated cognitive phenomena, thus balancing simplicity and direct applicability. This paper discusses the model’s composition, and demonstrates its utility through simulating human design teams in a cognitive study. Simulation results are compared directly to the results from human designers. The CISAT model is also used to identify the most beneficial characteristics in the cognitive study. Keywords: computational model, design cognition, teamwork, engineering design © 2015. This manuscript version is made available under the Elsevier user license http://www.elsevier.com/open-access/userlicense/1.0/