Graphic Facilitation in the Engineering Workflow: Adoption Framework, Barriers, and Future Roadmap

Engineering processes involve multiple interrelated activities comprehended through workflows. An increase in remote working accelerated by Covid-19 has pushed an immediate shift to technology-enabled processes, fundamentally shifting workflow dynamics causing information overload. Graphic facilitation as a high-artifact representation methodology for processes, concepts, or ideations, employing an organized cluster of images, arrows, diagrams, sketches, doodles, and text elements, offers a unique application for information management in an engineering context. The article further investigates the adoption framework focusing on the stakeholders. This study applies a systematic literature review approach to present essential literature across multiple databases and provides an adoption framework systematically exploring six years of popular peer-reviewed journal bibliographic and global patent grants data. The study reveals that the discussions are still emerging, and the domain is not thoroughly explored in the engineering context. The patent dataset showcases insignificant development; however, emerging approaches are summarized, and newer tools are presented along with an adoption framework as a roadmap to further exploration. Graphic facilitation demonstrates the potential capacity to support individuals and groups in different, creative, and innovative ways to address information overload. The presented outline will serve as a template for engineering leaders toward reviewing, experimenting with, and incorporating across the engineering workflows. The approach addresses information overload and presents its use cases along with entry-level barriers to graphic facilitation and suggests an exploratory future research scope, including enhanced patent data analytics that synergizes with the latest technologies mitigating barriers.