From Cognitive Artifacts to Social Artifacts: The iDeas Design Ecology (original) (raw)
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Supporting collaborative design activity in a multi-user digital design ecology
Computers in Human Behavior, 2017
Across a broad range of design professions, there has been extensive research on design practices and considerable progress in creating new computer-based systems that support design work. Our research is focused on educational/instructional design for students' learning. In this sub-field, progress has been more limited. In particular, neither research nor systems development have paid much attention to the fact that design is becoming a more collaborative endeavor. This paper reports the latest research outcomes from R&D in the Educational Design Studio (EDS), a facility developed iteratively over four years to support and understand collaborative, real-time, co-present design work. The EDS serves to (i) enhance our scientific understanding of design processes and design cognition and (ii) provide insights into how designers' work can be improved through appropriate technological support. In the study presented here, we introduced a complex, multiuser, digital design tool into the existing ecology of tools and resources available in the EDS. We analysed the activity of four pairs of 'teacher-designers' during a design task. We identified different behaviors-in reconfiguring the task, the working methods and toolset usage. Our data provide new insights about the affordances of different digital and analogue design surfaces used in the Studio.
Artefacts Supporting Distributed Design Collaboration
2014
This study addresses the mechanisms by which collaboration environments affect design teams’ collaboration via shared artefacts. We collected data by observing design teams consisting of experts and decision makers. The teams utilized (1) a state-of-the-art web conferencing collaboration environment and (2) a three-dimensional virtual world in their collaboration. Our analysis reveals the virtual worlds’ potential to foster the use of pictorial documents as design teams’ shared artefacts. In addition, our study embraces the web conferencing tool’s potential to nourish interaction on the basis of written artefacts. The findings contribute towards distributed design research, describing the role of design artefacts, and describing ways, how different collaboration environments can support distributed design teamwork.
Supporting Cooperative Design through Living Artefacts
We present findings from a field trial of CAM (Cooperative Artefact Memory) -a mobile-tagging based messaging system -in a design studio environment. CAM allows individuals to collaboratively store relevant information onto their physical design artefacts, such as sketches, collages, story-boards, and physical mock-ups in the form of messages, annotations and external web links. We studied the use of CAM in three student design projects. We observed that CAM facilitated new ways of collaborating in joint design projects. The serendipitous and asynchronous nature of CAM facilitated expressions of design aesthetics, allowed designers to have playful interactions, supported exploration of new design ideas, and supported designers' reflective practices. In general, our results show how CAM transformed mundane design artefacts into "living" artefacts that made the creative and playful side of cooperative design visible.
Digital Tools for Collaborative Design Processes
2021
Diverse practices of collaboration in design, research, teaching, or academia increasingly rely on digital online tools to facilitate processes of working and creating together. But a lot of the available digital platforms are not necessarily designed with the particular needs of these respective practices in mind. Rather, they might focus on commercial contexts, be built on limiting assumptions about work practices and collaboration, or simply lack capabilities for a substantial support of specific knowledge and creative practices within more diverse collaborative settings. In this paper, we take an exemplary look at three widely-used digital collaboration tools and their capacities and limitations to support collaborative design processes in particular. We aim to highlight a few of their embedded dispositions and built-in understandings of collaboration, creativity or productivity and suggest some aspirations for alternative designs.
Exploring the Role of Artefacts to Coordinate Design Meetings
Journal of Interaction Science, 2018
Design artefacts are vital to communicate design outcomes, both in remote and co-located settings. However, it is unclear how artefacts are used to mediate interactions between designers and stakeholders of the design process. The purpose of this paper is exploring how professional design teams use artefacts to guide and capture discussions involving multidisciplinary stakeholders while they work in a co-located setting. An earlier draft of this paper was paper published in the Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE 2017). This work adds substantial clarification of the methodology followed, further details and photographs of the case studies, and an extended discussion about our findings and their relevance for designing interactive systems. We report the observations of six design meetings in three different projects, involving professional design teams that follow a user-centered design approach. Meetings with stakeholders are instrumental for design projects. However, design teams face the challenge of synthesizing large amounts of information, often in a limited time, and with minimal common ground between meeting attendees. We found that all the observed design meetings had a similar structure consisting of a series of particular phases, in which design activities were organized around artefacts. These artefacts were used as input to disseminate and gather feedback of previous design outcomes, or as output to collect and process a variety of perspectives. We discuss the challenges faced by design teams during design meetings, and propose three design directions for interactive systems to coordinate design meetings revolving around artefacts.
2011
Designers employ a range of tools to gather, create, explore, sort, and act on user needs and conceptual design information. However, designers work both individually and collaboratively. This research is a descriptive study of technologies employed by designers to individually capture and collaboratively share user needs and conceptual designs. In this paper we examine the range and affordances of tools used by designers, and how they use these tools to share design information. We do this by looking at data gathered in interviews with practicing designers and design researchers, as well as documents produced in undergraduate and graduatelevel new product development courses. We gather a wide range of tools from our informants, and analyze them based on sharing semantics and formality. We then introduce a model of sharing as a cycle of capture, reflect and share. Finally, we provide design recommendations for future information tools that support both personal and collaborative user needs and conceptual design information. Sharing Semantics Private not visible or accessible to others Personal 'on-my-side-of-the table' data, semi-private (it is visible but not accessible by others). Public allows shared visibility and access.
Cognitive artefacts and collaborative design
1995
Cognitive artefacts (CA's) are acknowledged as important for individual cognition , but their function in group work has been largely neglected. Because information is represented symbolically in the CA, there are several possible problem representations. How a representation encodes this information may influence its cognitive processing -this is as important at the group level analysis as it is at the individual.
New contexts, requirements and tools to enhance collaborative design practice
The competitive, post-recessionary business environment is increasing pressures on the design industry to accelerate the cycle of product development. This has clear repercussions for product design practice. Design practitioners are under pressure to quickly develop products which will have immediate success in fiercely competitive markets. The ability to creatively innovate alongside other NPD (new product development) stakeholders has become a priority. Whilst collaboration has always been a cornerstone of design, the new contexts require a greater degree of transparency, sharing and communication amongst cross- disciplinary stakeholders. In order to be fit for purpose the available ICT tools need to evolve if they are to meet these challenges. An interdisciplinary research project entitled ‘COnCEPT’ (Collaborative Creative Design Platform) has been established, and is funded under the European Commission Framework 7 programme. The project examines how technology can be used to support collaborative and creative design practice. This paper reports on the literature surrounding collaboration in creative practices. The current context of professional design practice is described and qualitative research exploring shortcomings in the ICT set-up in design studios is examined. The paper sets out a case study to illustrate how the COnCEPT platform will address designers’ requirements for a collaborative software environment. Key features of the software are described – for example, real-time collaborative sketching spaces, ‘smart’ search tools, and the automatic generation of mood boards – which aim to facilitate creativity and streamline collaboration. The paper explores the potential of the platform, delineating its value in the design process.