Assessing Commonality and Differences in Terminology Across Design Disciplines

A common problem in design is misunderstandings due to the use of different terminology and concepts across different groups involved in the design process. This increases cost and risk in development. We discuss issues involved in trying to create a Unified Design Language that could act as a lingua franca across these groups. We describe a novel way of combining elicitation methods, ontologies, and use of human parallel processing, to improve the process of clarifying terminology used by different groups.