What kind of role and impact might an icebreaker have when the context is a design project and the strangers are the members of a newly formed multidiscipliary teamwork? Starting from this question, the one-year research project investigates the impact of a social game applied as icebreaker on the idea generation of a design process of multidisciplinary team-works.
The study has been carried out by exploring the characteristics of the idea- outcomes and design process of several team-works.
Those share the characteristics of working together for the first time, being composed by both designers and engineers and asked to accomplish the same design goal. The working condition differs by mean of the application or absence of the ice-breaker.
The analysis stress the importance of the creativity factor trying to understand if there is and, in case of a positive result, how it can be related to the usage of the icebreaker in the phase of idea generation in a design process.