This document proposes a shared data format for describing collaborative design processes. It discusses the need for such a format given the blurring boundaries between professional and amateur designers. Existing approaches to documenting design processes are reviewed, including considering design as a process, organization, documentation, production or artifact. A proposed data format is outlined based on an activity theory ontology describing design as a set of activities and possible dialogues. The format aims to facilitate modeling, analysis, management and visualization of collaborative design processes.

1. A SHARED DATA FORMAT FOR
DESCRIBING COLLABORATIVE
DESIGN PROCESSES
Massimo Menichinelli
Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture,
Department of Media, Media Lab Helsinki
massimo.menichinelli@aalto.fi

2. INTRODUCTION

3. ICT TECHNOLOGIES + DESIGN
●
Boundaries between amateur and professional designers
have been blurring (Atkinson, 2010; Gerritzen & Lovink,
2010; Manzini, 2015).
●
Emergence of the Maker Movement (Anderson, 2012;
Gershenfeld, 2005; Hatch, 2014) and of Indie Designers
(Bianchini & Maffei, 2012, 2013).
●
Online platforms and design:
●
Design with Crowdsourcing dynamics (Howard, Achiche,
Özkil, & McAloone, 2012; Howe, 2006; Nickerson,
Sakamoto, & Yu, 2011).
●
Design with Open Source and P2P dynamics (Abel,
Evers, Klaassen, & Troxler, 2011; Bauwens, 2009;
Ciuccarelli, 2008; Cruickshank, 2014; Menichinelli,
2016).
●
From designing artifacts with the help of a software,
to writing a software that directly generates artifacts
with a Generative Design approach (Bohnacker, Gross, &
Laub, 2012; Reas & McWilliams, 2010).

4. SHIFT OF FOCUS
●
[…] by increasingly moving its scope from single users
to local and online communities, from isolated projects
to complex system of solutions, while investigating
tools and strategies that enable and understand both
complex artifacts and mass-scale interactions.
●
Researchers and practitioners have started
investigating this
a)with a focus on localities and their traditions,
production systems and communities (Maffei & Villari,
2006; Verwijnen & Karkku, 2004; Villari, 2013),
b)with a focus on social innovations, especially
developed by citizens and informal designers
(Manzini, 2015; Meroni, 2007), or
c)with a focus on how ICT technologies enable new
modelling techniques (Menges & Ahlquist, 2011; Poole
& Shvartzberg, 2015; Singh & Gu, 2012) or
d)enable the organization of collaborative initiatives
(Menichinelli, 2016).

5. CONTEXT: MAKERS + INDIE DESIGNERS

6. SCOPE
●
This paper presents a data format for describing
collaborative design processes, building on existing
literature and cases and encoded in the development of
an experimental digital platform for the co-design of
collaborative processes.
●
This data format is a key component of a framework for
modelling, analysis, management and visualization of
design processes and such a framework could potentially
facilitate the design, understanding, management and
participation in open, collaborative and distributed
processes.

7. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1.RQ1: How can be collaborative design processes
documented, analyzed, managed, shared?
1.RQ2: How collaborative design processes have been
documented and defined with a common language so far?
2.RQ3: How could we improve the documentation of
collaborative design processes with a shared data
format as a common language?

8. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
●
Describing (design) processes: this section proposes an
overview of the possibilities regarding the
documentation of design processes for the Indie
Designers and Maker Movement context with the use of
data formats as shared languages. → RQ2
●
A shared data format for describing collaborative
design processes: this section elaborates a proposal of
a data format and a related meta-design digital
platform that documents collaborative design processes.
This proposal is the result of a the previous section
and of a process of software prototyping. → RQ3
●
Validation and future research: this section proposes
validation strategies for the data format and related
digital platform presented in the previous section and
proposes further research questions to be addressed in
future research. → RQ3
●
Conclusions: → RQ1-RQ2-RQ3

9. DESCRIBING (DESIGN)
PROCESSES

10. DESIGN PROCESSES #01
Design processes have been examined considering design
as the work done by designers, i.e. the actual practice:
●
Cross (2006) elaborated that there is a distinct
‘designerly’ form of activity and ways of knowing based
on 3 sources of knowledge: people, processes and
product. Designers learn and adopt a language that
connects and translate between different domains (needs
and design, meaning and design, and so on) by means of
a system of codes, but knowledge and awareness that
designers have of their practice is basically tacit,
making it thus difficult to elaborate, document and
share.
●
Green, Southee and Boult (2014) pointed out that
research on design processes has a relatively short
history, models are highly edited and rationalized
abstractions of reality but disconnected from the
actual practice and with limited consensus on their
structure.

11. DESIGN PROCESSES #02
●
Meta-design characterizes objectives, techniques, and
processes for creating new media and environments that
allow the owners of problems to act as
designers(Fischer, 2003; Fischer & Scharff,
2000).Rather than studying existing processes, the
Meta-Design approach focuses on designing environments
and tools for facilitating the emergence of design
processes. Meta-Design shifts the control of the design
process from designers to the hands of the users,
embedding the action of 'designing the design process'.
●
Documenting and sharing projects with an Open Source
approach is a common practice in the Maker Movement
(Menichinelli, Bianchini, Carosi, & Maffei, 2017;
Troxler, 2011), and for this reason the issue of
documenting how to design and produce a project among
different individuals, groups and locations is a
relevant one for this context, and several options are
possible.

12. DESIGN DOCUMENTATION (DD)
1.DD1: design as a process (“i.e. step by step
instructions”);
2.DD2: design as an organization (“i.e. networks of
interactions, work organization”);
3.DD3: design as a documentation (“i.e. blueprints”);
4.DD4: design as production (“i.e. files ready for
direct fabrication”);
5.DD5: design as an artifact (“the artifact and its
description”).

13. DD1: DESIGN AS A PROCESS
http://www.instructables.com/id/Volca-Synth-Foldable-Case/

14. DD2: DESIGN AS AN ORGANIZATION
Menichinelli, M. (2017). A data-driven approach for understanding Open Design.
Mapping social interactions in collaborative processes on GitHub.
The Design Journal, 20(sup1), S3643–S3658. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352869

15. DD3: DESIGN AS A DOCUMENTATION
http://fabacademy.org/archives/2012/students/menichinelli.massimo/index.html#

16. DD4: DESIGN AS PRODUCTION
http://developers.shapeways.com/

17. DD5: DESIGN AS AN ARTIFACT
http://fabacademy.org/archives/2012/students/menichinelli.massimo/index.html#

18. DESIGN DOCUMENTATION (DD)
Perspectives DD1: Design
as an
organization
DD2: Design
as a process
DD3: Design
as a
documentation
DD4: Design
as a
production
DD5: Design
as an
artifact
Dimension Meta-Design Meta-Design Design Design Design
Focus Process Process Artefact Process Artefact
Examples Rebuilt from
files and
users’
activity on
online
platforms
...
Instructables
Fablabs.io
...
Blueprints
Sketches
...
Thingiverse
Shapeways API
GitHub
...
Pictures
Videos
3D scan
...
Data API,
databases
API,
databases
2D / 3D data
representing
an artifact
not yet
produced
API,
databases
2D / 3D data
representing
an existing
artifact
Process as Dialogue Execution of
activities
Execution of
the
documentation
Execution of
activities
Outcome of an
execution of
activities
and dialogues

19. DESIGN DOCUMENTATION (DD)
While only DD2 focuses on processes as generally
considered (i.e. a sequence of steps depicting how to
replicate a process), all of these perspectives are
important:
●
they represent all aspects of design processes in the
practice, and therefore can be integrated in order to
further understand them with a more complex
perspective;
●
they represent building blocks for Meta-Design tools
and environments, and could be recombined and
integrated in order to further support collaborative
design processes with a more complex offer;
●
they enable the calculation of a Design Documentation
Score (DDS).

20. DESIGN DOCUMENTATION (DD)

21. DESIGN DOCUMENTATION (DD)

22. DESIGN DOCUMENTATION (DD): APPROACHES
1.ADD1: processes are considered as the execution of
activities;
2.ADD2: processes are considered as a dialogue between
actors;
3.ADD3: processes are reconstructed from the reverse
engineering of artifacts and documents.

23. DESIGN DOCUMENTATION (DD)

24. A SHARED DATA
FORMAT ...

25. A PROPOSAL
●
Ontology: “a set of concepts and categories in a
subject area or domain that shows their properties and
the relations between them” (Oxford Dictionaries,
2018), a terminological framework that describes thus
design processes.
●
Common approach: input-process-output (IPO) models
(Green et al., 2014).
●
Focus: processes as a set of activities (ADD1)and
possibility of considering processes as a dialogue
(ADD2).
●
Conceptual basis: Activity Theory (Engeström, 1987), a
framework for orienting researchers in understanding
complex socio-technical phenomena, for understanding
the dialectic contradictions and continuous development
of individual contributions to collaborative
initiatives.

26. ACTIVITY THEORY + META-DESIGN
1.S1: for providing a well established ontology of
activities, which can be integrated with other
elements;
2.S2: for the generation of guidelines for the
development of the digital platforms that enable the
former point; the importance of a platform here lays in
its abilities to enable the participation of more
users;
3.S3: for enabling both professional designers and
untrained users to work together in collaborative
design processes thanks to the conscious and reflexive
design of the activities constituting such
collaborative design processes.

27. ADD2
The data format would then encode the ontology
describing the activities of design processes, and if
dialogues between the participants of such processes are
included in the data format, also further approaches
like protocol analysis (Goldschmidt, 2014; Kan, 2017) or
natural language processing (Crowston, Allen, & Heckman,
2012) could be then applied to the same data.

28. A SHARED LANGUAGE AND PLATFORM
●
A shared language is of little use if not for
developers or researchers, and should be then embedded
into a software that would enable anybody to edit and
visualize the data in an intuitive way, and in a
collaborative way since the purpose of documenting and
sharing collaborative design processes is to improve
their dimension of collaboration.
●
Focus on developing a digital platform for it, thanks
to its ability to connect multiple users. Such a
platform would then be based on three dimensions:
1.Data (the data format);
2.Design (the intuitive visualization of the data
format);
3.Software (the agent that binds the data format, the
visualization and the interactions users have with it
and among them).

29. A META-DESIGN PLATFORM

30. ONTOLOGY (CODE)
https://gist.github.com/openp2pdesign/bd64fe6771569e36ab97e5631f00beff

31. ONTOLOGY (UML)

32. ONTOLOGY (UML)

33. ONTOLOGY (GRAPH)

34. VALIDATION & FUTURE
RESEARCH

35. VALIDATION RESEARCH OBJECTIVES (VRO)
1.VRO1: validate whether the meta-design framework,
platform and visualization are easy to understand and
to use, and it has a positive impact on collaborative
design processes. This objective is related to the
Software and Design dimension, and could be addressed
with an Action Research approach and User Experience
methods.
2.VRO2: validate whether the ontology and data format is
easy to understand and to use, and it has a positive
impact on collaborative design processes. This
objective is related to the Software and Data
dimension, and could be addressed with an Action
Research approach and User Experience methods.

36. VALIDATION RESEARCH QUESTIONS (VRQ)
1.VRQ1. The shared understanding of collaborative design
processes: how does the data format influence the
understanding of collaborative design processes?
2.VRQ2. The experience and practice of the users: how
has the data format modified the user experience of
collaborative processes?

37. VALIDATION METHODS (VM)
1.VM1. A qualitative analysis: the data format could be
discussed with design researchers and practitioners, in
order to understand how its representation of design
processes is perceived. → VRQ1.
2.VM2: a qualitative analysis: the data format could be
discussed with software developers and data scientists,
in order to understand how it could support the
integration with other platforms and tools, and how the
data it provides could be analyzed by researchers. →
VRQ2.
3.VM3: a qualitative analysis: the data format could be
discussed with design researchers, practitioners and
developers in order to understand how the development
of such an open system, and the integration with other
software and platforms, could provide a shared
understanding of design processes. → VRQ2 + support to
VRQ1.

38. CONCLUSIONS

39. CONCLUSIONS
Trend: digitalization and datafication.
How can be collaborative design processes documented and
how could we improve the documentation of collaborative
design processes with a shared data format as a common
language?
The paper tries to answer to this question by providing
a) an overview of the approaches to documenting design
projects and processes, b) elaborating a proposal of an
ontology and data format for describing collaborative
design processes and d) suggesting directions for future
research, especially in the validation of the proposal.
Further research might be important for understanding
how processes are perceived by both trained and
untrained designers and which are the most promising
metaphors, formats and strategies for visualizing them.

40. THANK YOU!
Massimo Menichinelli
massimo.menichinelli@aalto.fi