The document describes a study investigating how collaborative creativity can be supported electronically while maintaining face-to-face communication. The researchers designed a brainstorming application using an interactive table and wall display, and compared it to traditional paper-based brainstorming. They derived design guidelines for collaborative systems in interactive environments based on considerations from the application's design and observations during a user study with 30 participants. The guidelines aim to support group awareness, minimize cognitive load, and mediate mutual idea activation in order to foster collaborative creative problem solving.
Birger Sevaldson www.systemsorienteddesign.net
RSD5 Symposium Systemic Design for Social Complexity
Systems Oriented Design (SOD) is a dialect in the emerging field of Systemic Design. It is maybe the most designerly and practice oriented approach. The red blurry dot in the diagram below shows SOD being off center, closer to design and closer to practice.
Discourse Centric Collective Intelligence for the Common GoodAnna De Liddo
Slides of my invited talk given at the Computational Decision Making and Data Science Workshop in Belgrade, Serbia in June2018 http://cdmdsw2018.fon.bg.ac.rs/
This document discusses deliberation technologies and their current state, limitations, and opportunities for future research. It describes the state of online deliberation platforms, including their limitations in structuring discussions, avoiding echo chambers and polarization. It introduces argumentation-based deliberation systems and contested collective intelligence, which make the logical structure of discussions and disagreements more explicit. Examples of existing deliberation technologies are provided, along with their advantages over traditional discussion formats. Current limitations are outlined as well as opportunities for future research, such as improving interfaces, scaling technologies, and interoperability.
Democratic Reflection and other contested collective intelligence tools aim to harness technology to enable people to build consensus even when they disagree. These tools use techniques like crowdsourcing and natural language processing to analyze online conversations, identify points of agreement, and generate visualizations to help people reflect on different perspectives. Trials of these tools showed they can improve critical thinking, challenge assumptions, and potentially bridge political and social divides. The tools are being used to facilitate collaboration and evidence-based discussions among groups addressing complex issues like public policy, education, and building peace in places affected by conflict.
The document discusses the challenges of visualizing complex systems and presents an ongoing project called SystemViz that aims to address these challenges. It notes that complex systems are difficult for humans to understand without visual aids due to limits in working memory. The project involves taking stock of existing visualization methods, identifying concepts that are not easily depicted, and exploring recurring visualization problems. The overall goal is to develop guidelines and tools to help design effective visualizations for understanding complex systems.
What We Can Learn From Virtual Gaming Worlds, Cp Square, 29 October 2007Jeroen van Bree
The document discusses how virtual worlds can provide insights for improving knowledge transfer in organizations. It argues that virtual worlds intrinsically motivate users through competence, autonomy, relatedness, fantasy, and curiosity in a way that computer-supported collaborative work does not. This higher level of intrinsic motivation may better support the informal communication and trust needed for knowledge transfer. The author hypothesizes that intrinsic motivation when using computer-mediated communication positively impacts the social aspects of work like knowledge transfer. Further research is planned to explore how design patterns from virtual worlds could be applied to organizational settings.
Birger Sevaldson www.systemsorienteddesign.net
RSD5 Symposium Systemic Design for Social Complexity
Systems Oriented Design (SOD) is a dialect in the emerging field of Systemic Design. It is maybe the most designerly and practice oriented approach. The red blurry dot in the diagram below shows SOD being off center, closer to design and closer to practice.
Discourse Centric Collective Intelligence for the Common GoodAnna De Liddo
Slides of my invited talk given at the Computational Decision Making and Data Science Workshop in Belgrade, Serbia in June2018 http://cdmdsw2018.fon.bg.ac.rs/
This document discusses deliberation technologies and their current state, limitations, and opportunities for future research. It describes the state of online deliberation platforms, including their limitations in structuring discussions, avoiding echo chambers and polarization. It introduces argumentation-based deliberation systems and contested collective intelligence, which make the logical structure of discussions and disagreements more explicit. Examples of existing deliberation technologies are provided, along with their advantages over traditional discussion formats. Current limitations are outlined as well as opportunities for future research, such as improving interfaces, scaling technologies, and interoperability.
Democratic Reflection and other contested collective intelligence tools aim to harness technology to enable people to build consensus even when they disagree. These tools use techniques like crowdsourcing and natural language processing to analyze online conversations, identify points of agreement, and generate visualizations to help people reflect on different perspectives. Trials of these tools showed they can improve critical thinking, challenge assumptions, and potentially bridge political and social divides. The tools are being used to facilitate collaboration and evidence-based discussions among groups addressing complex issues like public policy, education, and building peace in places affected by conflict.
The document discusses the challenges of visualizing complex systems and presents an ongoing project called SystemViz that aims to address these challenges. It notes that complex systems are difficult for humans to understand without visual aids due to limits in working memory. The project involves taking stock of existing visualization methods, identifying concepts that are not easily depicted, and exploring recurring visualization problems. The overall goal is to develop guidelines and tools to help design effective visualizations for understanding complex systems.
What We Can Learn From Virtual Gaming Worlds, Cp Square, 29 October 2007Jeroen van Bree
The document discusses how virtual worlds can provide insights for improving knowledge transfer in organizations. It argues that virtual worlds intrinsically motivate users through competence, autonomy, relatedness, fantasy, and curiosity in a way that computer-supported collaborative work does not. This higher level of intrinsic motivation may better support the informal communication and trust needed for knowledge transfer. The author hypothesizes that intrinsic motivation when using computer-mediated communication positively impacts the social aspects of work like knowledge transfer. Further research is planned to explore how design patterns from virtual worlds could be applied to organizational settings.
A document discusses collaborative e-governance and outlines some key ideas:
1) Collaborative planning processes supported by scientific research tend to create powerful internal networks that can influence policymakers. Participation is different from true collaboration which emphasizes outputs, outcomes, and building social capital.
2) Process thinkers emphasize assessing the performance of collaborative planning by looking at outcomes like social capital, institutional capacity, and innovation rather than just outputs. Science can lead to social outcomes when done collaboratively.
3) Early views of e-governance saw it creating more transparent and cheap interaction between governments and citizens, but the boundaries are messy in reality. Local e-governance studies found poorer cities have more inform
The document describes tools and methods used to facilitate design processes involving multiple perspectives. It introduces the "HEC Design Lens" which can be used to analyze facilitation based on its human-centered (H), experiential (E), and creative (C) dimensions. Examples are provided of activities used in various events to address these dimensions by inviting reflection on diverse perspectives, using immersive formats, and prompting innovative thinking. A five-level framework is also presented for analyzing networked series of events from the scale of individual activities up to large programs.
The challenges of remote scientific collaborationProyecto CeVALE2
1) Remote scientific collaboration faces challenges due to distance, including lack of common context and difficulty establishing trust between collaborators.
2) A study found that projects with more institutions involved were less well-coordinated and had fewer positive outcomes.
3) Key factors that contribute to successful remote collaboration include the nature of the work, common ground between participants, their willingness to collaborate, management style, and technology readiness. Detailed communication, management and decision-making plans are important.
This workshop asks how we can use methods drawn from design, art, and craft, informed by
interdisciplinary and systems thinking, to materialize not just envisioned ‘things’, but abstract or
invisible ideas and relationships. There is an emerging set of research practices using tangible or
material models, or constructive making and embodying to visualize how people think about concepts
ranging from invisible systems and infrastructures to mental models, personal data which would
otherwise be invisible, or even the phenomenological dimensions of experiences themselves. Examples
include explorations of the design of public services, healthcare processes, mental health experiences,
career paths, crafters’ movements, and experiences of social networks (Aguirre Ulloa and Paulsen,
2017; Rygh and Clatworthy, 2019; Luria et al, 2019; Ricketts and Lockton, 2019; Nissen and Bowers,
2015; Fass, 2016).
Managing Business Processes Communication and Performance Yves Caseau
Presentation at ICORES 2012 on Enterprise models.
This talk presents a computational model of a generic enterprise (BPEM, which stands for Business Process Enterprise Model), based upon the core concept of business process. BPEM may be seen as a bridge between two worlds of “Enterprise Models”, the world of mathematical models, formal and fully operational for optimization purposes and the world of conceptual models (boxes & arrows type) for management science, for reasoning and communicating about what a company is.
In today’s rapidly changing world, organizations and societies are struggling with the
complexity and uncertainties of emerging issues and challenges in the current dynamic
environment (Conklin, 2005; Snowden & Boone, 2007). Designers have a strategic role in
helping organizations to deal with this complexity and uncertainty by developing artefacts
that help experiencing possible futures (Maessen, van Houten, & van der Lugt, 2018).
Preliminary findings from our research showed that people with some help readily engage in
exploring far futures, yet have difficulties afterwards to distill next steps for the near future
while resisting the dominant collective pull to the comfort zone of current paradigms and
daily routines (Maessen, 2019). We therefore developed a workshop format, containing a
set of interventions and tools to guide people to engage in exploring far away possible
futures and link these back to anticipating actions in the present.
This workshop aims to help participants explore their desired futures and the barriers preventing these futures from being achieved. It uses a technique called Causal Layered Analysis to uncover the deep-seated beliefs and systems that both perpetuate current problems and limit visions of alternative futures. The workshop is divided into morning and afternoon sessions. In the morning, participants will reflect on and discuss their ideas of a desired future. In the afternoon, they will analyze the systems and beliefs needing to change to make their idealized futures possible, bringing unconscious constraints into conscious awareness. The goal is to help participants envision alternative futures by addressing underlying causes of failures in the present system and questioning limiting beliefs.
This document discusses a study on resilience from a multi-stakeholder perspective. It examines resilience as resisting, recovering, and changing in response to influences. Eleven participants were interviewed for 53 minutes on average, generating over 60,000 words of transcript. The document analyzes the perspectives of different stakeholders on the purpose, time, and change dimensions of resilience. It finds that social systems are central to resilience and can thrive despite problems with technical systems. Change in social systems was seen to lead to changes in technical systems over time.
This document discusses structured dialogic design (SDD) as a methodology for facilitating large group collaboration and decision making around complex problems. It outlines some key challenges with large group work, including complexity, lack of shared understanding, and limited cognitive abilities. SDD provides a structured process and graphic tools to help large groups unpack complexity, build shared understanding, and make informed decisions through techniques like clustering observations, identifying influence relationships, and developing action plans. The document includes examples of SDD being used to address barriers to public participation in broadband access.
What is Human Centred Design - The Design JournalJoseph Giacomin
1) The document discusses the definition and practice of human-centered design. It defines human-centered design as an approach that focuses on understanding people's needs, desires, and experiences through techniques like empathy, scenarios, and personas in order to design intuitive products and services.
2) It proposes a model of human-centered design as a pyramid with physical and perceptual characteristics at the base and meaning and purpose at the apex. The model suggests that designs addressing higher-level questions can offer more value and opportunities for success.
3) The document argues that while early approaches focused on usability, modern human-centered design also considers emotional engagement and can define new meanings through interactions with people.
Designing services as systems is increasingly important. Those in healthcare and government don’t have much of a choice. However, envisioning services as systems is a hurdle. The trouble is from commonplace definitions of ‘service’ and ‘system’. But what if they are one and the same? An approach to communicating the designs of services in the form of strategic narratives, involves solving a puzzle to generate the story. The puzzle represents the duality of system and service. The “proof of work” reflects the difficulty in designing services as systems.
The document discusses how the field of technical communication is shifting from a focus solely on document design and usability to also include designing user experiences and engagement. Experience design aims to create feelings of community and sustained interaction beyond just task completion. Recent research highlighted in the document examines how cultural factors and adding social elements to interfaces can increase engagement and trust. The role of technical communicators may expand to include experience design, which considers holistic experiences rather than just interface details to promote emotional appeal and user engagement.
The document discusses patterns for promoting individual and collective creativity in socio-technical systems. It outlines different types of knowledge and the importance of social factors in technology design. Some proposed patterns are described, including "Reality Check", "Who Speaks for Wolf?", and "Greater Gathering" which aim to balance diversity and shared identity in groups over time.
Supporting relationships with awareness systemsOnno Romijn
The paper describes the design of a novel end-to-end communication system for helping elderly people and their grandchildren keep in touch in a pleasurable, low-pace interaction. The paper focuses on the requirements gathering process that combined diaries with field testing of prototypes and interviews; thereby bringing elements of more ‘playful’ design to a well- structured requirements engineering process.
Social computing and knowledge creationMiia Kosonen
This document discusses knowledge creation through social computing and the role of tacit knowledge in online communication. It addresses two research questions: 1) What are the processes underlying knowledge creation online? 2) What is the role of tacit knowledge in online communication? The document reviews literature on knowledge creation, virtual communities, social computing, and tacit knowledge. It finds that tacit knowledge plays a role in online communication by enabling individuals to communicate, build knowledge through interpretation, and develop shared understanding and norms within online communities.
1. Scenario based design uses narratives or stories to describe how users will interact with a system. These scenarios help designers understand user needs and how people will accomplish tasks with the system.
2. Scenarios are both concrete, providing specific examples of usage, and flexible, allowing for refinement and elaboration. This helps designers manage the fluid nature of design situations.
3. Considering scenarios promotes a work-oriented design process focused on the needs of users. Scenarios also help designers reflect on and evaluate their work throughout the design process.
Personal dashboards for individual learning and project awareness in social s...Wolfgang Reinhardt
The document discusses the concept and implementation of personal dashboards within the eCopSoft collaborative development environment. It aims to enhance awareness, learning, and coordination for developers working on multiple projects. There are three types of dashboards proposed: 1) a community dashboard, 2) a project dashboard, and 3) a my-eCopSoft dashboard for individual users. The dashboards will combine and display data from different eCopSoft tools and projects through customizable "pods". This will provide developers with an integrated view of their work across multiple teams and contexts.
The document discusses the history and future of the semantic web. It begins with a brief history of the world wide web and Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for a semantic web. It then explains the concept of the semantic web, how it will work by linking data on the web, and how this will change and improve how people search for and interact with information online. The document also outlines some of the key technologies that enable the semantic web, such as linked data, URIs, RDF, ontologies and SPARQL. It provides examples of current semantic web applications and concludes by discussing the opportunities and potential disruptions the semantic web may bring.
A document discusses collaborative e-governance and outlines some key ideas:
1) Collaborative planning processes supported by scientific research tend to create powerful internal networks that can influence policymakers. Participation is different from true collaboration which emphasizes outputs, outcomes, and building social capital.
2) Process thinkers emphasize assessing the performance of collaborative planning by looking at outcomes like social capital, institutional capacity, and innovation rather than just outputs. Science can lead to social outcomes when done collaboratively.
3) Early views of e-governance saw it creating more transparent and cheap interaction between governments and citizens, but the boundaries are messy in reality. Local e-governance studies found poorer cities have more inform
The document describes tools and methods used to facilitate design processes involving multiple perspectives. It introduces the "HEC Design Lens" which can be used to analyze facilitation based on its human-centered (H), experiential (E), and creative (C) dimensions. Examples are provided of activities used in various events to address these dimensions by inviting reflection on diverse perspectives, using immersive formats, and prompting innovative thinking. A five-level framework is also presented for analyzing networked series of events from the scale of individual activities up to large programs.
The challenges of remote scientific collaborationProyecto CeVALE2
1) Remote scientific collaboration faces challenges due to distance, including lack of common context and difficulty establishing trust between collaborators.
2) A study found that projects with more institutions involved were less well-coordinated and had fewer positive outcomes.
3) Key factors that contribute to successful remote collaboration include the nature of the work, common ground between participants, their willingness to collaborate, management style, and technology readiness. Detailed communication, management and decision-making plans are important.
This workshop asks how we can use methods drawn from design, art, and craft, informed by
interdisciplinary and systems thinking, to materialize not just envisioned ‘things’, but abstract or
invisible ideas and relationships. There is an emerging set of research practices using tangible or
material models, or constructive making and embodying to visualize how people think about concepts
ranging from invisible systems and infrastructures to mental models, personal data which would
otherwise be invisible, or even the phenomenological dimensions of experiences themselves. Examples
include explorations of the design of public services, healthcare processes, mental health experiences,
career paths, crafters’ movements, and experiences of social networks (Aguirre Ulloa and Paulsen,
2017; Rygh and Clatworthy, 2019; Luria et al, 2019; Ricketts and Lockton, 2019; Nissen and Bowers,
2015; Fass, 2016).
Managing Business Processes Communication and Performance Yves Caseau
Presentation at ICORES 2012 on Enterprise models.
This talk presents a computational model of a generic enterprise (BPEM, which stands for Business Process Enterprise Model), based upon the core concept of business process. BPEM may be seen as a bridge between two worlds of “Enterprise Models”, the world of mathematical models, formal and fully operational for optimization purposes and the world of conceptual models (boxes & arrows type) for management science, for reasoning and communicating about what a company is.
In today’s rapidly changing world, organizations and societies are struggling with the
complexity and uncertainties of emerging issues and challenges in the current dynamic
environment (Conklin, 2005; Snowden & Boone, 2007). Designers have a strategic role in
helping organizations to deal with this complexity and uncertainty by developing artefacts
that help experiencing possible futures (Maessen, van Houten, & van der Lugt, 2018).
Preliminary findings from our research showed that people with some help readily engage in
exploring far futures, yet have difficulties afterwards to distill next steps for the near future
while resisting the dominant collective pull to the comfort zone of current paradigms and
daily routines (Maessen, 2019). We therefore developed a workshop format, containing a
set of interventions and tools to guide people to engage in exploring far away possible
futures and link these back to anticipating actions in the present.
This workshop aims to help participants explore their desired futures and the barriers preventing these futures from being achieved. It uses a technique called Causal Layered Analysis to uncover the deep-seated beliefs and systems that both perpetuate current problems and limit visions of alternative futures. The workshop is divided into morning and afternoon sessions. In the morning, participants will reflect on and discuss their ideas of a desired future. In the afternoon, they will analyze the systems and beliefs needing to change to make their idealized futures possible, bringing unconscious constraints into conscious awareness. The goal is to help participants envision alternative futures by addressing underlying causes of failures in the present system and questioning limiting beliefs.
This document discusses a study on resilience from a multi-stakeholder perspective. It examines resilience as resisting, recovering, and changing in response to influences. Eleven participants were interviewed for 53 minutes on average, generating over 60,000 words of transcript. The document analyzes the perspectives of different stakeholders on the purpose, time, and change dimensions of resilience. It finds that social systems are central to resilience and can thrive despite problems with technical systems. Change in social systems was seen to lead to changes in technical systems over time.
This document discusses structured dialogic design (SDD) as a methodology for facilitating large group collaboration and decision making around complex problems. It outlines some key challenges with large group work, including complexity, lack of shared understanding, and limited cognitive abilities. SDD provides a structured process and graphic tools to help large groups unpack complexity, build shared understanding, and make informed decisions through techniques like clustering observations, identifying influence relationships, and developing action plans. The document includes examples of SDD being used to address barriers to public participation in broadband access.
What is Human Centred Design - The Design JournalJoseph Giacomin
1) The document discusses the definition and practice of human-centered design. It defines human-centered design as an approach that focuses on understanding people's needs, desires, and experiences through techniques like empathy, scenarios, and personas in order to design intuitive products and services.
2) It proposes a model of human-centered design as a pyramid with physical and perceptual characteristics at the base and meaning and purpose at the apex. The model suggests that designs addressing higher-level questions can offer more value and opportunities for success.
3) The document argues that while early approaches focused on usability, modern human-centered design also considers emotional engagement and can define new meanings through interactions with people.
Designing services as systems is increasingly important. Those in healthcare and government don’t have much of a choice. However, envisioning services as systems is a hurdle. The trouble is from commonplace definitions of ‘service’ and ‘system’. But what if they are one and the same? An approach to communicating the designs of services in the form of strategic narratives, involves solving a puzzle to generate the story. The puzzle represents the duality of system and service. The “proof of work” reflects the difficulty in designing services as systems.
The document discusses how the field of technical communication is shifting from a focus solely on document design and usability to also include designing user experiences and engagement. Experience design aims to create feelings of community and sustained interaction beyond just task completion. Recent research highlighted in the document examines how cultural factors and adding social elements to interfaces can increase engagement and trust. The role of technical communicators may expand to include experience design, which considers holistic experiences rather than just interface details to promote emotional appeal and user engagement.
The document discusses patterns for promoting individual and collective creativity in socio-technical systems. It outlines different types of knowledge and the importance of social factors in technology design. Some proposed patterns are described, including "Reality Check", "Who Speaks for Wolf?", and "Greater Gathering" which aim to balance diversity and shared identity in groups over time.
Supporting relationships with awareness systemsOnno Romijn
The paper describes the design of a novel end-to-end communication system for helping elderly people and their grandchildren keep in touch in a pleasurable, low-pace interaction. The paper focuses on the requirements gathering process that combined diaries with field testing of prototypes and interviews; thereby bringing elements of more ‘playful’ design to a well- structured requirements engineering process.
Social computing and knowledge creationMiia Kosonen
This document discusses knowledge creation through social computing and the role of tacit knowledge in online communication. It addresses two research questions: 1) What are the processes underlying knowledge creation online? 2) What is the role of tacit knowledge in online communication? The document reviews literature on knowledge creation, virtual communities, social computing, and tacit knowledge. It finds that tacit knowledge plays a role in online communication by enabling individuals to communicate, build knowledge through interpretation, and develop shared understanding and norms within online communities.
1. Scenario based design uses narratives or stories to describe how users will interact with a system. These scenarios help designers understand user needs and how people will accomplish tasks with the system.
2. Scenarios are both concrete, providing specific examples of usage, and flexible, allowing for refinement and elaboration. This helps designers manage the fluid nature of design situations.
3. Considering scenarios promotes a work-oriented design process focused on the needs of users. Scenarios also help designers reflect on and evaluate their work throughout the design process.
Personal dashboards for individual learning and project awareness in social s...Wolfgang Reinhardt
The document discusses the concept and implementation of personal dashboards within the eCopSoft collaborative development environment. It aims to enhance awareness, learning, and coordination for developers working on multiple projects. There are three types of dashboards proposed: 1) a community dashboard, 2) a project dashboard, and 3) a my-eCopSoft dashboard for individual users. The dashboards will combine and display data from different eCopSoft tools and projects through customizable "pods". This will provide developers with an integrated view of their work across multiple teams and contexts.
The document discusses the history and future of the semantic web. It begins with a brief history of the world wide web and Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for a semantic web. It then explains the concept of the semantic web, how it will work by linking data on the web, and how this will change and improve how people search for and interact with information online. The document also outlines some of the key technologies that enable the semantic web, such as linked data, URIs, RDF, ontologies and SPARQL. It provides examples of current semantic web applications and concludes by discussing the opportunities and potential disruptions the semantic web may bring.
This document discusses neural networks and their applications. It covers perceptrons, which are single-layer neural networks, and the perceptron training rule. It also describes gradient descent search and the delta rule for training neural networks. The document introduces multi-layer neural networks and the backpropagation algorithm for training these more complex networks. In the end, it provides examples of applications of neural networks such as text-to-speech, fraud detection, and game playing.
This document discusses exercises related to information gain and decision tree learning. Exercise 2 calculates the information gain of attributes a1 and a2 on a sample dataset. Exercise 3 discusses overfitting related to using a unique identifier attribute. Exercise 4 shows that an attribute with many unique values can achieve maximum information gain but may not be a good predictor. Exercise 5 discusses approaches for handling missing values when calculating information gain.
This document discusses online collaboration tools and their use in design projects. It begins by outlining trends in design moving away from individual creators towards collaborative teams. Online tools provide opportunities for asynchronous interaction, networking, and combining abilities across stakeholders. Key challenges include organizing information, facilitating interaction, and enhancing communication. Different collaboration models are described such as libraries, solicitation, teams, and communities. Brainstorming approaches encourage generating and building on ideas. Guidelines for online collaboration include developing clear problems, diverse groups, and evaluating ideas. The document concludes by outlining requirements for a final project to design a website to facilitate online collaboration in design domains.
A Systematic Literature Review For Human-Computer Interaction And Design Thin...Amy Roman
This document summarizes a systematic literature review comparing the human-computer interaction (HCI) design process and the design thinking (DT) process. The review analyzed 72 peer-reviewed papers published between 1972 and 2017. The HCI process focuses on understanding user needs, analyzing issues, designing prototypes, and evaluating designs. The DT process is non-linear and emphasizes empathy, defining problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing with users. The review aims to identify how the processes overlap, differ, and what each can learn from the other, in order to integrate HCI and DT for improved problem solving in academia and industry.
Design schools have the potential to play an important role as agents of sustainable change by establishing Design Labs within each school. Design Labs can help facilitate new open and collaborative design networks by using student and teacher skills to investigate local sustainability initiatives, support co-design processes, provide visions and proposals, communicate solutions, empower communities, replicate promising models, and synergize systemic changes. For example, the Nutrire Milano project in Milan demonstrates how a Design Lab is supporting the regeneration of short food supply chains in the city.
Design schools have the potential to play an important role as agents of sustainable change by establishing Design Labs within each school. Design Labs can use design classes and research to stimulate and support open, collaborative design networks in various ways, such as investigating local resources, facilitating co-design processes, visioning future scenarios, communicating social innovation initiatives, enabling communities, replicating successful organizations, and synergizing systemic changes. For example, the Nutrire Milano project in Milan demonstrates how a Design Lab operates within emerging design networks to regenerate the local food system through community-driven solutions.
Interface Design - an overview on recent findings in HCI research and examples of interfaces created by WebFoo Interface Division.
This slideshow was presented by our Creative Director, Mihai Varga, at a guest lecture at Surrey University in March 2014.
COLLABORA: A COLLABORATIVE ARCHITECTURE FOR EVALUATING INDIVIDUALS PARTICIPAT...ijseajournal
The execution of collaborative activities enables interaction among its participants, however, the real
problem is to evaluate how much each subject contributed in the development of the activity. The
evaluation process allows to inform important aspects about the individual or the group, such as:
reliability, interdependence, flexibility, commitment, interpersonal relationship, productivity and
management strategies. This work proposes is based in domain based architecture and computer-supported
collaborative learning (CSCL) in order to measure individual and group contributions to the
accomplishment of its activities. The evaluation of the collaboration is made in a semi-automated way
using as criteria measures of collaboration present in the literature like counting the amount of meaningful
and valid words in conversations, which allows to evaluate its commitment. After the activity finalizes, a
collaboration score is given to the participant of the group. The proposed architecture was implemented in
the education domain. In addition to generate a set of exercises to the studied subject, the architecture
helped to provide statistic data related to the collaboration assessment among the peers during the
development of collaborative activities.
This document provides an introduction to interaction design, covering several key topics:
1. It defines interaction design as designing interactive products and digital experiences to support how people communicate and interact. This involves considering who will use the products and how, where, and for what activities.
2. Successful interaction design requires a multidisciplinary team with skills in areas like engineering, design, psychology and more. The process involves establishing requirements, designing alternatives, prototyping, and evaluating designs.
3. A quality user experience is central to interaction design. This involves how people feel about and interact with a product on sensory, emotional and narrative levels over space and time. The goal is to design for positive user experiences.
This document discusses establishing an optimal framework for collaborative design processes. It examines how playing, learning, and working have blurred together with new technologies and can inform each other. Several case studies are presented that explore using crowdsourcing tools for collaborative urban design projects. The goal of the research is to analyze different size design projects and determine an optimal allocation of resources and workflow based on the project scope and use of collaborative technologies.
This document discusses the importance of computers in human life and management until 2020. It covers several topics related to human-computer interaction (HCI) including the goals of HCI research, the relationship between humans and computers, differences between the human brain and computers, resources used for interaction, and interface analysis and specification. The key goals of HCI research are to create computer interfaces that are more usable and understandable in order to maximize effectiveness and efficiency. Understanding how humans use technology and creating tools to enable building appropriate interfaces are important to achieving this goal.
Collective and cumulative - some strategies of everyday design-in-useinuseproject
The document discusses design-in-use and collective design processes. It notes that design does not end with the creation of objects, but continues as people incorporate technologies into their everyday lives. It examines questions around who designs, what is designed, how design work is distributed, and how decisions are made. It argues that more attention should be paid to design-in-use and the opportunities it provides for collaboration. Two case studies are presented that show complex relationships between different actors engaging in grassroots innovation. The document advocates for making the "design space" more visible and increasing actors' capabilities to initiate innovations.
Gamify Your Team Design Thinking : Experimental Study on a Co-Evolution Theor...Junie Kwon
The document discusses an experimental study on applying gamification techniques to team design thinking processes. It describes using a game called "Manito" where participants secretly observed and designed for each other, sharing insights on social media. Workshops guided participants through design thinking stages of exploring problems and creating prototypes. A survey evaluated outputs on storytelling, sketches, ideas, and attractiveness. Statistical analysis found measures like pins, likes, followers and followings correlated to iterative participation, supporting gamification and social media as effective tools for collaborative design processes.
Towards Decision Support and Goal AchievementIdentifying Ac.docxturveycharlyn
Towards Decision Support and Goal Achievement:
Identifying Action-Outcome Relationships From Social
Media
Emre Kıcıman
Microsoft Research
[email protected]
Matthew Richardson
Microsoft Research
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Every day, people take actions, trying to achieve their per-
sonal, high-order goals. People decide what actions to take
based on their personal experience, knowledge and gut in-
stinct. While this leads to positive outcomes for some peo-
ple, many others do not have the necessary experience, knowl-
edge and instinct to make good decisions. What if, rather
than making decisions based solely on their own personal
experience, people could take advantage of the reported ex-
periences of hundreds of millions of other people?
In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of mining the
relationship between actions and their outcomes from the
aggregated timelines of individuals posting experiential mi-
croblog reports. Our contributions include an architecture
for extracting action-outcome relationships from social me-
dia data, techniques for identifying experiential social media
messages and converting them to event timelines, and an
analysis and evaluation of action-outcome extraction in case
studies.
1. INTRODUCTION
While current structured knowledge bases (e.g., Freebase)
contain a sizeable collection of information about entities,
from celebrities and locations to concepts and common ob-
jects, there is a class of knowledge that has minimal cov-
erage: actions. Simple information about common actions,
such as the effect of eating pasta before running a marathon,
or the consequences of adopting a puppy, are missing. While
some of this information may be found within the free text of
Wikipedia articles, the lack of a structured or semi-structured
representation make it largely unavailable for computational
usage. With computing devices continuing to become more
embedded in our everyday lives, and mediating an increasing
degree of our interactions with both the digital and physical
world, knowledge bases that can enable our computing de-
vices to represent and evaluate actions and their likely out-
comes can help individuals reason about actions and their
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republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
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A case study analysis on digital convergent design: Skynet Platformdi8it
This document presents the results of a case study analysis on the SkyNet digital convergent design platform. The study employed structured interviews to survey people's attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors regarding convergent services. Key findings include:
1) Participants were most likely to engage with interactive TV features directly related to enhancing TV content experience, such as getting additional information about shows.
2) Internet-based interactive services saw less usage, suggesting people view TV as primarily for passive viewing.
3) Exposure to interactive features through devices like Sky+ boxes increased likelihood of using interactivity.
4) Constraints like slow performance or disrupting the TV experience reduced openness to interactivity. Participants preferred features that
The challenges posed by the complexity of our times requires the Design discipline to understand the many complex relationships behind the social, business, technology and territory dimensions of each project. Such nature of complex systems lays not only inside design projects, but also inside the design processes that generate them, and the ability of organizing them through meta-design approaches is becoming strategic. Since the turn of the century, the design discipline has increasingly moved its scope from single users to local and online communities, from isolated projects to system of solutions. This shift has brought researchers and practitioners to investigate tools and strategies to enable mass- scale interactions by adopting several models and tools coming from software development and web-based technologies: Open Source, P2P, DDD (Diffuse, Distributed, and Decentralized) systems. This influence has matured over the years, and if we observed in the past how such systemic models can be applied in the design practice (part 1), we are facing now a new phase where Design will have an increasing role in enabling such systems through the analysis, visualization and design of their collaborative tools, platforms, processes and organizations (part 2). This scope falls into the Meta-Design domain, where designers build environments for the collaborative design of open processes and their resulting organizations (part 3). In this paper, we address this phenomena by elaborating the Open Meta-Design framework (part 4), that provides a way for designing open, collaborative and distributed processes (including those in the professional design domain). The paper positions the framework among current meta-design and design approaches and develops its features of modeling, analysis, management and visualization of processes. This framework is based on four dimensions: conceptual (describing the philosophy, context and limitations of the approach), data (describing the ontology of design processes), design (visualizing designing processes) and software (managing the connections between the ontology and the visualization, the data and design dimensions). We believe that such a framework could potentially facilitate the participation and the creation of open, collaborative and distributed processes, enabling therefore more relevant interactions for communities. As a conclusion, the paper provides a roadmap for developing and testing the Open Meta-Design framework, and therefore evaluating its relevance in supporting complex projects (part 5).
The document discusses the goals and challenges of the ESSENCE project, which aims to develop online tools to facilitate structured analysis and dialogue around global issues like climate change. It notes that while argument mapping tools exist, they can be difficult for most users and lack incentives for both creation and use of arguments. The document advocates taking a socio-technical systems approach to develop tool systems tailored to specific collaborative communities, by understanding user goals, roles, and collaboration patterns in their unique context of use.
Apply Funnel Model To Design Thinking ProcessSara Alvarez
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Modelling the Media Logic of Software SystemsJan Schmidt
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The document describes the process of constructing decision trees. It begins with an example weather dataset and shows how to build a decision tree to predict whether to play or not based on attributes like outlook, temperature, etc. It then discusses the key steps in constructing decision trees which include selecting the best attribute to split on at each node based on information gain. It also discusses overfitting and the need for tree pruning. The document provides formulas to calculate information gain and discusses strategies like using a chi-squared test to select statistically robust splits during tree construction.
This document outlines linear regression, which is a machine learning technique for predicting real-valued outputs based on numerical input variables. It assumes a linear relationship between the inputs and outputs. Linear regression finds the linear equation that best fits the training data by minimizing a sum of squared errors function. The parameters of the linear equation can be estimated analytically through differentiation and solving for when the partial derivatives are equal to zero.
This document summarizes a lecture on decision tree learning. It introduces decision trees and algorithms like ID3 for building trees from data. Key concepts discussed include information gain, overfitting, pruning trees, handling continuous attributes, and predicting continuous values with regression trees. Decision trees are built by recursively splitting the training data on attributes that maximize information gain until reaching leaf nodes with class predictions.
Christof Monz gave a lecture on probabilities and information theory for a data mining class. He provided a quick refresher on key probability concepts like sample spaces, events, and probability functions. He discussed examples of calculating probabilities for coin tosses and dice rolls. Monz also covered entropy as a measure of uncertainty and how more optimal encoding can achieve lower entropy. Finally, he included a brief review of calculus concepts like derivatives that are relevant to data mining.
The document summarizes the key topics from the first lecture of a data mining course. It introduces data mining as the process of extracting implicit and potentially useful information from large amounts of data. It discusses why data mining is needed due to the abundance of data and challenges of manual organization. The lecture then covers machine learning techniques used for tasks like classification, clustering, and prediction. It provides examples of data mining applications and outlines the typical steps involved in a machine learning approach.
This document contains instructions for homework assignments in data mining. It includes 3 exercises:
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This chapter discusses subjectivism as an alternative to objectivism for providing a theoretical foundation for information management. Subjectivism focuses on human sense-making and interpretation rather than objective truths. The chapter argues that subjectivism fails to address economic value, a key concern for organizations. It suggests combining objectivism and subjectivism into an integrated approach. Subjectivism is illustrated using practice-based social theories, which view social practices as transcending the divide between objectivism and subjectivism. However, differences between the two philosophies remain fundamental.
Groups tend to focus discussion on information that is commonly known, neglecting unique information known to only some members. This can result in suboptimal decisions. Groups also tend to accentuate their initial views, leading to more extreme decisions than individuals would make alone. Highly cohesive groups may prioritize consensus over considering information that challenges group unity. Effective information management is needed to help groups make better use of all relevant information in their decision making.
This chapter discusses how information management has been strongly influenced by the philosophical tradition of objectivism. Objectivism views the world as consisting of distinct objects that exist independently of human cognition and can be studied to gain objective knowledge. It has shaped key definitions and goals in information management, such as defining information and knowledge as granules that represent objective realities. Information management also shows influence from microeconomics, viewing information exchange as a market and aiming to maximize participation and competition. However, the chapter argues that objectivism may not provide the best foundation for information management, as it cannot adequately deal with the subjective nature of information.
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The document discusses several applications for analyzing and generating video content including ForkBrowser for browsing large video collections, AUTEUR for automatically generating slapstick video sequences, and additional applications. It provides details on the architectures and techniques used for content representation, narrative planning, and visual design in AUTEUR for computational humor and creativity. The applications require complex, application-dependent content descriptions and are time-critical but allow for flexible video generation and analysis.
This document proposes ORL, an extension of OWL with Horn clause rules. ORL aims to overcome some expressive limitations of OWL, especially regarding properties, while maintaining compatibility with OWL's syntax and semantics. Rules are added as a new type of axiom and are given a formal abstract syntax and model-theoretic semantics as an extension of OWL DL. The addition of rules makes ontology consistency undecidable but provides greater expressive power for modeling relationships between properties. Examples are given and extensions to OWL's XML and RDF syntaxes are discussed to accommodate the new rule constructs.
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Hcm p137 hilliges
1. Designing for Collaborative Creative Problem Solving
Otmar Hilliges, Lucia Terrenghi, Sebastian Boring, David Kim, Hendrik Richter, Andreas Butz
Media informatics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich
Amalienstrasse 17, 80333 Munich, Germany
otmar.hilliges|lucia.terrenghi|sebastian.boring|andreas.butz@ifi.lmu.de,
kimdav|richterh@cip.ifi.lmu.de
ABSTRACT
Collaborative creativity is traditionally supported by formal
techniques, such as brainstorming. These techniques im-
prove the idea-generation process by creating group syner-
gies, but also suffer from a number of negative effects [12].
Current electronic tools to support collaborative creativity
overcome some of these problems, but introduce new ones,
by either losing the benefits of face-to-face communication
or the immediacy of simultaneous contribution.
Using an interactive environment as a test bed, we are in-
vestigating how collaborative creativity can be supported
electronically while maintaining face-to-face communica-
tion. What are the design-factors influencing such a sys-
tem?
We have designed a brainstorming application that uses an
interactive table and a large wall display, and compared the
results of using it to traditional paper-based brainstorming
in a user study with 30 participants. From the considera-
tions that went into the design and the observations during
the study we derive a number of design guidelines for col-
laborative systems in interactive environments.
Author Keywords
Collaborative creative problem solving, brainstorming, in-
teractive environments, tabletop displays, wall displays,
large displays
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):
Miscellaneous, H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces:
Organizational design
INTRODUCTION
Collaborative problem solving requires much more than
simply joining work forces. Knowledge and information
need to be exchanged, different skills have to be coordi-
nated, and the information communicated by others needs
interpretation so that new ideas can be created and new
solutions can be found. This process – with its core re-
quirements of communication, coordination and interpreta-
tion – is called collaborative creative problem solving [1].
In Fischer [16] creativity occurs in the relationship between
an individual and a society, and between an individual and
his or her technical environment. Appropriate socio-
technical settings can amplify the outcome of a group of
people by both augmenting individual creativity and multi-
plying rather than simply summing up individual output.
Physical, social and interaction contexts thus play an impor-
tant role in guiding cognitive processes.
In a ubiquitous computing scenario where technology
blends in with the environment, we observe a paradigm
shift from Human-Computer Interaction to computer-
mediated human-to-human interaction. With the introduc-
tion of large, interactive, high-resolution displays built into
walls and tables, we face for the first time the challenge,
and the opportunity, to design socio-technical systems
which not only support collaboration but also mediate and
foster human-to-human communication and interaction.
Current computer systems already offer a variety of com-
munication channels for distributed collaboration (e.g., in-
stant messaging, e-mail, online communities, groupware)
and support for collaborative work (CSCW). However, im-
portant parts of our professional and personal life still de-
pend on co-located collaboration and face-to-face commu-
nication, with all the nuances of facial expression and body
language, and the immediacy of verbal communication.
Visibility of action is a fundamental aspect of group aware-
ness [13]. Shared displays that support simultaneous input
afford novel communication patterns as well as social pro-
tocols, but the still predominantly used WIMP paradigm
has poorly supported such social contexts thus far.
In face-to-face collaborative creative problem-solving set-
ups, technology is very often absent or shut down because it
is considered disruptive to communication and the creative
flow [37]. Using single-user systems in a collaborative set-
ting leads, in most cases, to a communication breakdown
since the user’s concentration has to shift away from the
group and towards the computer in order to use it. Rather
than relying on technology, these meetings still rely on the
physical and social benefits of using surfaces such as tables
and walls to exchange and visualize different types of in-
formation (paper documents, presentations, pictures, etc.)
and the different collaboration behaviors implied therein.
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137
2. Interactive surfaces offer new possibilities for the design of
socio-technical systems that can partly exploit the physical
and social affordances of a traditional face-to-face collabo-
rative environment and at the same time benefit from the
affordances of digital technology such as persistent data
storage, easy information access, and the possibility to re-
view previous processes or to undo certain actions.
Building on an analysis of the factors that influence the
brainstorming process in manual and electronic settings, we
postulate the design goals for socio-technical systems that
mediate creative group processes. We present a brainstorm-
ing system as an example of a socio-technical environment
that supports co-located collaborative creativity and our
results from the evaluation of this implemented system. In
designing and evaluating the system we studied how several
interactive displays, each having distinct roles and functions
in the process, influenced co-located collaboration. In con-
clusion and building on previous work in the field, we pro-
pose new design considerations to meet the requirements of
future collaborative ubiquitous computing systems.
COLLABORATIVE CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING
Brainstorming [30] is a technique for divergent thinking. It
can be individual, although the term more often refers to a
group process for generating as many ideas or options as
possible in response to an open question. Thus, it is fre-
quently used for collaborative creative problem solving and
it builds on a few main principles: quantity over quality of
ideas, elaboration on others’ ideas and absence of criticism.
The technique relies on the communication among group
members to stimulate idea generation, and on coordination
to maximize the individuals’ involvement and interpretation
of ideas in order to create new intellectual associations. In
this context the physical and social affordances of surfaces
play an important role (e.g. a table for idea generation, a
wall or whiteboard for idea discussion, paper for idea ex-
pression and recording). These properties of brainstorming
qualify it as a prime example for the creative problem solv-
ing group processes we want to investigate.
Osborn [30] anticipated positive synergy effects of such a
technique, which affect the productivity of ideas. Other
studies [12] show that these factors are apparently out-
weighed by several negative social implications of the tech-
nique (see Figure 1). They have shown that nominal brain-
storming groups (aggregating ideas from separate individu-
als) outperform face-to-face groups. The main reasons for
this are losses in productivity through production blocking,
social loafing and evaluation apprehension [2].
In addition to these findings later studies have shown that
groups using Electronic Brainstorming Systems (EBS) ap-
pear to outperform both manual and nominal brainstorming
groups [5, 10, 12]. The main reasons (see Figure 1) for in-
creased productivity are parallelism, to overcome produc-
tion blocking, and anonymity, to reduce evaluation appre-
hension. Even if anonymity bears the danger of social loaf-
ing [23], its benefits appear to outweigh the losses.
Figure 1: Factors influencing brainstorming productivity.
Although EBS produce more ideas and can track the proc-
ess better than manual brainstorming, the original technique
(usually paper-based) is still ubiquitous in professional life
and has not yet been replaced by EBS, as a recent study
shows [11]. Why doesn’t a superior technology replace the
inferior one? The answer to this has several aspects and not
all of them are grounded in the qualities of the technique
itself. The number and quality of ideas is not the only value
to be assessed.
Since group processes involve individuals, the individuals’
subjective perception of the process plays an important role.
The perceived quality of the outcome itself depends on the
degree to which personal interests are represented and val-
ued in the group’s output. Second, the face-to-face situation
of manual brainstorming has qualities which, in the long
run, might even outweigh pure productivity measurements,
namely the positive social aspects of team building, group
awareness and a shared sense of achievement.
If technology is either disruptive for an individual to ex-
press her/himself, or for a group to communicate in a face-
to-face situation, EBS won’t maintain those values that
people perceive in using the manual brainstorming tech-
nique, despite other quantifiable benefits such as productiv-
ity of ideas and storage provided by remote EBS.
Considering the tradeoff (see Table 1) between technique
performance and social implications of EBSs we wanted to
build a system that maintains the empirically proven advan-
tages of EBS while combining them with the social advan-
tages of manual face-to-face brainstorming. Hence we sac-
rificed the anonymity of group members (which is expected
to lessen evaluation apprehension) in favor of the social
implications of group awareness and personal communica-
tion. We deliberately accepted that this decision might de-
crease the number of ideas generated because we expect
that it improves the subjective perception of quality and
hence the acceptance of the whole process. In addition, we
are mostly interested in co-located collaboration since we
want to generalize our findings to other collaborative crea-
tivity scenarios more complex than this particular one.
138
3. PC-
based
face-to
face
Electronic
remote
Manual Electronic
face-to-
face
Synergy
Group
awareness -
Anonymity - - -
Parallelism - -
Reduced soc.
loafing - -
Reduced
production
blocking
- -
Reduced
evaluation
apprehension
- - -
Table 1: Properties of different technologies regarding brain-
storming productivity and group processes
DESIGN GOALS
We aimed to design a socio-technical environment which
positively affects collaborative creative problem solving.
For the support of such a group process we tried to enhance
both the divergent as well as the convergent thinking (i.e.,
generation and elaboration of ideas), which are typical and
essential activities in problem solving. Thus, we considered
the affordances of technologically enriched environments.
In order to facilitate both generation and selection of ideas,
we used large interactive surfaces in the environment. The
horizontal plane of a table affords writing, face to face
communication, territoriality [35], and group awareness,
while a wall display allows and supports shared visualiza-
tion, overview and context awareness. The combination of
these interactive surfaces opens interesting possibilities for
the design of a socio-technical environment.
The issue of more fluid interaction with large, high-
resolution displays that support creative group processes
has been treated in [19, 21, 26, 39]. A summary of recent
advances in the field of interaction techniques for large dis-
plays can be found in Czerwinski et al. [8]. Most of this
research has focused either on the properties and design
implications for vertical large displays [32] or on the influ-
ence of horizontal displays on co-located collaborative
work [34], thus mostly focusing on a specific type of dis-
play. We take a more ecological, holistic approach by look-
ing at the combination of different displays across the proc-
ess, both in time and space.
Immediacy of Communication and Interaction
Our main goal was to combine some of the benefits of pre-
vious EBS with the positive social implications of face-to-
face groups. First, we wanted to avoid production block by
guaranteeing true parallelism of input such that every mem-
ber of the group could contribute at any time. Additionally,
we wanted to store every idea and make it permanently
available such that it can be read and interpreted by every
member at all times.
We also wanted to minimize the costs of interaction and
communication so that even in small groups the synergy
effects can outweigh the losses. This can be achieved by
two complementing measures: first, by blending the com-
puter into the environment in which the collaborative crea-
tive processes take place, and second, by blending the vir-
tual interface into the task so that knowing the craft (or
technique) reduces the cost of learning and using the sys-
tem. Thus, essential elements of the interface should behave
just like their counterparts in the manual process.
In this way we hope to avoid some of the factors that seem
to hinder the communication process [2], e.g., the size of a
personal computer screen or the keyboard as a disruptive
interface in this context.
Enhance Phrasing
The difference between chunking and phrasing is explained
in more depth by Buxton [4]. Different representations of
the task and different levels of skills between novices and
experts imply different granularity of detail at which people
approach the solution of a problem. The more novice the
user, the lower the level at which s/he approaches the prob-
lem. This results in chunking the main goal into sub-goals,
to be achieved through sub-tasks. The acquisition of skills
enhances the automatic performance of some sub-tasks,
thus achieving the high-level goals faster and more easily
(phrasing). To enhance phrasing (i.e., the undisrupted flow
of action and creativity), the task needs to be represented in
a way that supports chunk maximization. Indeed, the bigger
the chunks are, the less cognitive resources are wasted. In
this sense we aim at an interface which allows a fluid and
immediate interaction with the task at hand. Furthermore,
the interface needs to support the externalization of the
chunks so as to allow reflection and association.
Minimize Cognitive Load
The human capability of keeping chunks of information in
short-term memory is very limited [28]. Thus, we need to
design the context (e.g., the representation of the task) so as
to minimize the use of cognitive resources for holding acti-
vated bundles in short term memory. Typical techniques for
freeing cognitive resources are externalization, e.g., through
the use of space, epistemic action [24, 25] and visual output
as well as spatial mapping [29, 22]. Thus more resources
remain available for creative associations.
139
4. Mediate Mutual Association Activation
When a person is exposed to stimuli from a variety of con-
texts s/he is more likely to have novel associations [33].
The activation of such associations can be automatic (with-
out intentional conscious awareness), or depend upon the
context of the stimuli (conscious capacity spreading activa-
tion, [3]). This suggests that the design of a context of in-
teraction can affect the association patterns. Furthermore, it
suggests that the context of interaction can stimulate activa-
tion patterns that would otherwise be unlikely in the auto-
matic spreading activation. Thus, with a socio-technical
environment which positively affects collaborative creativ-
ity, we hope to create a context that supports the explora-
tion of different areas of our knowledge network.
In order to enable such a process, it is important that people
can perceive each other’s ideas and communicate about
them. We think that providing different visual cues about
the generated ideas on the table and on the wall, as well as
giving users the possibility to explicitly exchange ideas
(and the visual representation thereof) can enable and foster
the generation of new unexpected associations.
Supporting Group Awareness and Overview
Visibility of action is a main design principle for embodied
interaction [14]. It provides awareness of what other col-
leagues are doing and how the actions of group members
affect the shared artifacts and relies on existing theories
from CSCW [13]. Group awareness (i.e. the condition
where members perceive the presence of other group mem-
bers and the possibility to communicate with them), seems
to provide a basis for informal communication. By giving
every group member at any time the possibility to under-
stand what other members are doing, the isolation of single
individuals is avoided. Mutual visibility of actions eases the
coordination and interpretation of the contributors’ actions.
DESIGN CHOICES
By our design choices we try to merge some of the advan-
tages of traditional techniques for face-to-face problem
solving, with some of the benefits of the technology em-
bedded in the interactive surfaces of the environment.
In order to do so, we designed a multi-user application for
supporting co-located collaborative problem solving, which
together with the users forms a socio-technical environment
resembling a face-to-face meeting situation. This means
that the system doesn’t have any standard computer moni-
tors or input devices but solely relies on interactive, touch
sensitive displays built into the meeting room’s table and
wall (see Figure 2). Presuming that display technology will
be cheap and distributed enough to pervade our working
environments in the near future, we explore the potential of
a socio-technical environment as ecosystem, by analyzing
how communication and spatial mapping can be supported.
Thus, we do not focus on the real estate and properties of
one specific display in isolation, but rather on the combina-
tion of displays and on the question how the relationships
between the different surfaces affect the group process.
Figure 2: Our instrumented room with wall and table displays
In this setup we developed an application, which meta-
phorically builds on the “idea card” method, i.e., the use of
Post-its for brainwriting. Geschka [17] and VanGundy [42]
developed the Interactive Brainwriting Pool Technique. In
this method group members write their ideas on a piece of
paper that is then placed in the center of the table for an-
other member to read prior to writing their next comment.
The use of Post-its during brainwriting has become a rather
common practice in collaborative problem solving. They
afford the recording of ideas in written rather than just ver-
bal form in the generative phase. Furthermore, they support
a certain territoriality and the creation of semantic regions.
When participants are given a stack of post-its and start
sticking them around their working area, they define their
personal region, which remains visible to others, thus creat-
ing a mutual awareness among participants.
Using Post-its on surfaces supports the convergent thinking
phase as well, when participants stick and move Post-its on
flip charts or white boards in order to recognize patterns
and create clusters. In this phase they structure the devel-
oped ideas into more meaningful concepts and try to iden-
tify relations between them. The affordances of paper have
been more deeply discussed in [36, 7, 18]. Studies of paper
in work practice show that paper continues to be widely
used for many reasons including its spatial flexibility (it can
be quickly arranged in physical space), sociability (it facili-
tates face-to-face communication), and tailorability (it is
easily annotated) [7]. Furthermore [18] explains that some
of the reasons why designers use paper rather than elec-
tronic communication is for its “friendliness”, immediacy
and affordances for face-to-face communication of ideas.
To this respect we opted for a pen based input to support
the fluid generation of ideas with handwriting. A limited
gesture vocabulary was designed and implemented. Users
can start generating ideas by drawing a square on the table
surface. This event triggers the appearance of a large yellow
square, resembling a Post-it, thus defining the area to write
in (see Figure 3). By tipping a designated area of the Post-
140
5. it, the latter shrinks to a smaller size and becomes moveable
(see Figure 4). The user can then create new Post-its/ideas
by drawing new squares in a blank region of the table and
writing within the yellow region. This choice was made in
order to create visual constraints for writing, so as to iden-
tify ideas as units, and to create visual cues for distinguish-
ing territories and patterns. When the Post-it is shrunk its
content is still readable.
Figure 3: Creating a Post-it and writing on it
The choice of using handwriting and gestures to enhance
fluid interaction and the group process was also made in
Guimbretière et al. [20]. Furthermore Buxton [4] examine
the effect of compound tasks on the users’ cognitive load.
These are tasks that usually can be expressed in one sen-
tence (e.g. write text onto a post-it) but have to be broken
down into multiple steps in standard desktop applications
(e.g. select target, choose text tool, type text). This may
result in additional cognitive burden on top of the actual
task (idea generation). Kinesthetic gestures can overcome
such problems by mapping to whole phrases rather than
functions of the underlying system. The desired one-to-one
correspondence between concept and gesture leads to inter-
faces which are more compatible with the users’ mental
model. Our design supports simultaneous, gesture-based
interaction, as well as the mutual visibility of action. Direct
manipulation in this context refers to a coincident spatial
mapping of input and output (there is no such device as a
pointer or a remote controller). This creates a transparent
causal relationship between gestures and output, and sup-
ports visibility of gestures. Furthermore, it allows the crea-
tion of temporal spatial structures, which are fundamentals
to epistemic actions [25]. Creative processes highly rely on
epistemic actions, as these allow the externalization and
visualization of different alternatives [24]. The size of the
table (see Figure 2) allows participants to see each other’s
actions, movements and gestures in real time. It also sup-
ports a sense of common ground by displaying the results of
both participants’ interactions on a single shared display.
Thus, both controls and resources (i.e., the different Post-
its) are continuously available to both participants.
Building on these considerations we designed the Post-its in
such a way that they can be edited, moved, deleted and cop-
ied by any participant after they have been created. Addi-
tionally we created a mechanism to encourage building on
each other’s ideas: With a quick movement of the pen, each
user can deliberately skid one idea to the other participant.
The Post-it slides quickly across the table and smoothly
reorients itself towards the other user. This supports the
explicit sharing of ideas and thus encourages the creation of
association chains.
Figure 4: Dragging a Post-it and skidding it
The immediate and visible change of the shared visual
landscape is supported by the system in additional ways. As
the participants create Post-its in their working area, thus
already creating a distinct territorial setup, the Post-its ap-
pear simultaneously on the vertical display, which is lo-
cated next to the table. On the vertical display the Post-its
are reoriented upright, i.e., readable for both readers, but
they maintain a spatial mapping to the territorial setup on
the table display. In this sense the perception of territoriality
and group awareness are supported. A participant will rec-
ognize his/her own “territory” on the wall, but at the same
time gain an overview of the ideas created by the group.
When users tip the Post-it in the middle, where a small grid
is displayed (Figure 3), they can enlarge it again to edit its
content. When they instead tip its periphery (Figure 4) and
drag the pen, they move the Post-it, both on the horizontal
and the vertical display. When users move from the table
(generative phase, divergent thinking) to the wall display
(structural phase, convergent thinking), they can spatially
organize the ideas by rearranging them on the wall. In addi-
tion they can create clusters by drawing a circle around
some Post-its (Figure 5). Clusters are merged by dragging
them close together. Drawing a cross on the border of a
cluster causes it to dissolve into single Post-its again. Clus-
ters can be connected to each other or to single Post-its by
drawing a line from the border of one cluster to the border
of another one (Figure 5) or to the center of a Post-it.
Finally, whole clusters can be moved across the display,
thus moving all the Post-its they contain. This set of cluster-
ing techniques clearly extends the functionality of a physi-
cal whiteboard or flip chart while it maintains the direct
manipulation characteristics thereof, facilitating the creation
of a structured knowledge representation, which is easily
editable by every participant through direct manipulation.
141
6. Figure 5: Creating and connecting clusters.
EVALUATION
We implemented our brainstorming system in order to ver-
ify whether its design meets the initial design goals and to
determine which effect our design choices had on the crea-
tive process, its objective outcome and the subjective feel-
ing of productivity of the participants. The evaluation of
subjective experiences is an open topic for the ubiquitous
computing community, especially when the aim is to assess
an experience involving different displays, people, and
temporal phases. For the assessment of a single users’ sub-
jective experience we opted for questionnaires. The col-
laborative creative process and its outcome are even harder
to measure quantitatively. Different approaches for measur-
ing collaborative creativity processes in novel interaction
settings have been proposed in the literature.
Conversational analysis has been previously used to assess
collaboration. Tatar et al. [40] apply techniques from Psy-
cholinguistics to evaluate the conversational patterns of a
system supporting co-located brainstorming. Damm et al.
[9] videotaped, observed and interpreted several sessions of
a collaborative software design process. The observations
allowed qualitative statements about the different designs
studied, but the process didn't produce any quantitative
data. Consolvo et al. [6] provide a good overview of rele-
vant known study and evaluation techniques and discuss
their applicability to ubiquitous computing settings. For
quantitative evaluations, they propose Lag Sequential
Analysis (LSA) and describe how it was applied to their
environment. LSA relies on the idea of logging and count-
ing relevant events in the environment and generates statis-
tical data about the observed process. In our evaluation we
logged the creation and exchange of ideas as the basic
events in the creativity process.
Pinelle et al. [31] propose the use of task analysis for the
evaluation of collaborative processes. They propose a hier-
archical task model and describe its application in a tech-
nique called collaboration usability analysis. The structure
of the brainstorming task is relatively simple and in our
study we only identified whether ideas were independently
generated, built on an own previous idea, or resulted from
seeing or discussing ideas of the brainstorming partner. Van
der Lugt [43] specifically recorded how people built on
each other's ideas in a brainstorming process and generated
link diagrams from this data. From the link diagrams he
then generated statistical data about the number and type of
connections between ideas. We found in the analysis of our
videotapes, that it was often not possible to identify all ear-
lier ideas which might have contributed to the creation of a
particular new one and that the attempt to do so would be
very speculative and error-prone. Therefore, we only identi-
fied chains of ideas, which directly built on each other (as-
sociation chains), and evaluated their size and number in
order to obtain statistical data.
Subjects
The study we conducted consisted of 30 participants in 15
teams of two subjects each. To avoid gender bias we had 5
pure male, 5 mixed and 5 pure female teams. Some of the
subjects knew each other while others had never met be-
fore. Among the participants a variety of professions was
present, such as computer science students, architects, de-
signers, civil engineers, musicologists and journalists. All in
all we had participants from 5 different nations.
Environment
The system was deployed in an instrumented environment
containing an interactive meeting table as well as displays
embedded into an interactive wall (see Figure 2). Both the
table and the wall display were included in our electronic
brainstorming system.
The interactive table consists of an LCD monitor embedded
into a wooden table and is equipped with a DViT overlay
panel [38] (a vision based tracking system providing multi-
ple simultaneous inputs) for interactivity. Hence, the par-
ticipants share an overall table space of 1.6 x 1.2 meters.
The complete wall is an interactive surface with a width of
5 meters and a height of 2.5 meters containing three back-
projected displays. The two side displays as well as the rest
of the wall are tracked by four cameras. The center display
additionally provides high precision input through another
DViT panel.
While applying the paper-based technique, the teams used
the same table covered with paper in the idea generation
phase and a large (1.8 x 1.5 meters) piece of paper,
mounted on the opposite wall, in the structural phase.
Tasks and Procedure
We conducted a within-group comparative study between
our system and the original paper-based manual brainstorm-
ing technique to assess the brainstorming productivity of
both techniques. Furthermore, we ran questionnaires before
and after the task as a qualitative user study to evaluate the
subjective perception of and judgments about our system.
We also assessed the subjective judgments of the brain-
storming results in these questionnaires. Each session took
approximately one hour and included the two question-
naires, introductions to the technique and the interface, as
well as one warm-up task. The participants received two
different but related tasks. Each of these tasks had to be
executed in a different technique. The order of the tech-
niques was inverted between each group to level fatigue
and related effects.
142
7. Considering the broad variance in professional education
we had to pick tasks that could be addressed without any
domain specific knowledge or education. Thus, we picked
rather simple tasks to which, we felt, everybody could re-
late, and thus contribute a significant number of ideas. In
the first task we asked the teams to take care of an Inuit
coming to a foreign country neither speaking the country’s
language nor having any useful equipment for the new en-
vironment. We considered this task a fruitful field for idea
generation, because necessary or useful items would in-
clude most, if not all, items in personal possession of the
participants. For ease of comparison we designed the sec-
ond task as similar as possible while still leaving plenty of
room for new unique ideas. In this second task the teams
had to discuss their own needs when they would leave their
home country for emigration into harsh, icy arctic territo-
ries. The subjects were asked to collect all material and
immaterial items they would consider necessary for sur-
vival under these conditions.
Results
In order to obtain quantitative data about the number and
types of ideas generated, we analyzed the system’s log files
and the videotapes to count new independent ideas (N),
ideas which built on own earlier ideas (O), ideas which re-
sulted from seeing somebody else write down an idea (S)
and ideas which resulted from talking about an idea (T). In
addition to this, we identified association chains and
counted their number (Nc) and length (Lc). Figure 6 shows
the overall numbers of ideas and their relative distribution.
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Paper-based Electronic
N
O
S
T
Sum
Nc
Lc
Figure 6: Overall number of ideas (from 15 sessions) and rela-
tive distribution of types N, O, S and T, as well as number (Nc)
and the average length (Lc) of association chains
We found out, that the overall number of ideas generated
remained roughly equal (with a slight, but not statistically
significant decrease). This roughly confirmed our expecta-
tions, since we had not really changed any of the influenc-
ing parameters (Figure 1). It also suggests that the intro-
duced technology was not substantially disruptive for the
process of collaborative creative problem solving.
Figure 7: Subjective judgments about communication, num-
ber and quality of ideas
In the questionnaire before the evaluation, we had asked the
participants whether they had encountered problems with
insufficient communication, and with an insufficient num-
ber and quality of ideas in their previous experience with
manual brainstorming. In the questionnaire after the evalua-
tion, we asked them about these same problems when using
our electronic brainstorming system. Figure 7 shows a
comparison of the results.
Here, we found that the judgment had slightly changed after
using our electronic brainstorming system. From the par-
ticipants’ point of view, the communication turned out to
slightly decrease in the electronic version (70% before,
60% after) while the perceived number of ideas remained
the same (73% / 73%) and the quality (80% / 90%) of ideas
increased. The perceived decrease in communication is
valid within the participants but it is not strictly significant
(p ≈ 0.15). The increase in the perceived quality of ideas is
significant (p < 0.05).
Additionally, we asked the participants about the ease of
use of each interaction gesture we have implemented. Here
we received consistently good results regarding all interac-
tions. Only the possibility to write on the table received
rather low ratings. We think that this might be due to the
clumsy pen used, and the slightly unusual hand posture
which was required in order not to confuse the DViT track-
ing system. Figure 8 summarizes the results of users’ rat-
ings of the different interaction gestures.
To obtain an overall impression we finally asked the par-
ticipants whether they would use the paper-based version or
the electronic version of brainstorming in the future, assum-
ing that our system would be at product level. In our study,
80% of our participants would favor the electronic version
over the paper-based one.
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
More Communication More Ideas Better Ideas
Before Trial After Trial
143
8. 0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Create
Post-It
Delete
Post-It
Open
Post-It
Close
Post-It
Copy
Post-It
Move
Post-It
Write
Post-It
Hard to learn Neutral Easy to learn
Figure 8: Subjective judgments about the ease of use of inter-
action gestures implemented in our system
INTERPRETATION
The data from our questionnaires and video transcripts
shows that the quantitative result of the brainstorming ses-
sions doesn’t differ significantly between electronic and
paper-based methods. In contrast to this, the perceived
judgments were consistently better for electronic brain-
storming. We attribute this to an improved communication,
which is supported by the free form comments participants
gave in the post-questionnaire, as well as two observations
we made during the sessions.
The first observation was that participants used the wall
display, showing ideas written on the desk immediately, as
an additional external reference. When they wanted to step
back mentally and obtain an overview, they looked at the
wall where all ideas generated so far were available in
much better overview. This common reference was a factor
which apparently increased group awareness and hence
improved communication.
The second observation is that this often led to resuming
discussion after a pause or a dead end. When a team got
stuck, it was much easier to review all the ideas generated
so far and start over by elaborating on earlier ones.
DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
From our observations with the implemented system, both
from informal tests and our user study, we generalized the
following design considerations which we think can be ap-
plied to other socio-technical environments in order to sup-
port collaboration and creativity. They partly confirm exist-
ing guidelines for co-located collaboration on tabletop dis-
plays [34], but also apply to more general socio-technical
environments, comprising different classes of displays.
Pseudo-Physicality
Participants stated that they found the interface of the sys-
tem very easy to learn. We credit this on the close resem-
blance of each interface element to the real world. For ex-
ample, the interface contains visual elements that resemble
the real world equivalents (e.g. Post-it notes). These ele-
ments are also manipulated in the same way as they would
be in the real world (writing on paper with a pen). This al-
lows users to build on knowledge they gathered from a life-
long learning experience with the real world and the objects
in it. Touch sensitive interfaces and fluid gestures make
using the technology more continuous and analog. This
allows users to apply strategies they already use in the real
world to both implicitly and explicitly convey information
about the objects in the environment (e.g., territoriality).
Meta-Physicality
Even if the close resemblance of virtual items to real world
artifacts is beneficial to the ease of learning the interface, it
is worth exploiting the specific and different affordances of
digital media. These can augment physical actions, provid-
ing effects which are only possible in the digital realm (e.g.
the automatic re-orientation and appearance on the wall of
virtual Post-its). As long as objects have a clearly distinct
and explainable behavior, users seem to be willing to accept
and use a technique even if it is unrealistic in the strict
sense. For example, the participants reacted very positively
to the possibility to skid Post-its across the table, even if
this is not possible with real paper. Some even figured out
“that this is the behavior of a billiard ball”, which in fact is
true in terms of the physics we used for simulation.
Seamless Social Transitions
Transitions between concurrent and collaborative work
must be seamless in order to minimize obstacles for com-
munication. In co-located collaborative work it is natural
for humans to transition fluidly between collaborative and
concurrent individual activities [15]. For example, we ex-
perienced that participants in our study frequently switched
between developing their own ideas and re-joining the
group later to jointly develop an idea. This transition must
not be disrupted by the technology in order to prevent
communication breakdowns. To ensure this kind of seam-
less transitions several measurements can be taken:
All elements of the interface must be designed such that
there is no single or multi user mode. Every interaction
atom must be performable (in a meaningful way) so that it
can be carried out alone, in parallel with others and collabo-
ratively. As in a conversation, there should be no explicit
control token that has to be passed around in order for
someone to use the system. Everyone must be able to inter-
act with the system at any time. Thus it is important that all
data structures and controls (both virtual and physical input
devices) are replicated. This allows users to apply their
learned and familiar social protocols.
Finally, it is important that users can dynamically reconfig-
ure the spatial layout of items in the workspace so that they
can create distinct areas: private areas for interactions with
objects needed in personal work, and public areas to medi-
ate communication and interaction with the group [41].
144
9. Visibility of Social Interaction
Real time visibility of participants’ input actions and up-
dated output representation can foster group awareness. In
this sense, the system should afford communication through
body language and mediate communication through the
interface at the same time. The gesture vocabulary intro-
duced by the system merges with the one which is typical in
the face-to-face collaborative context. The possibility of
skidding Post-its to each other is an example of that. In this
context, the visible gesture of skidding a Post-it suggests to
the other group members the idea of “passing” something
over. Similarly, people move Post-its across the wall by
passing them among each other with an explicit gesture. In
contrast to a desktop or a mouse-based interaction para-
digm, the system affords body language and facial expres-
sion, rather than hindering those with the use of a keyboard
and of a small, vertical, personal screen.
The visibility of the produced Post-its in real time both on
the table and on the wall allows collaborators to immedi-
ately see, understand and react to the actions of others,
which can spark innovation and new ideas. The redundancy
of output representation on both displays affords different
perspectives: people can visually “step back” from their
focused view on the table and gain an overview of the
shared output on the wall: this can produce novel ideas and
communication.
SUMMARY
Based on an analysis of the factors influencing collabora-
tive creative problem solving, we have presented a number
of design goals for electronic systems to support this proc-
ess. Guided by these goals, we have designed and built an
electronic brainstorming system in an interactive environ-
ment using a tabletop and a large wall display, and dis-
cussed the design choices we made.
Our system was evaluated in a user study with 30 partici-
pants in order to verify the success of our design choices
and their influence on the brainstorming process. We found
that the quality and number of ideas generated with our
system was similar to classical paper-based brainstorming,
with the additional advantage of storing ideas and processes
which is afforded by our digital system. Furthermore the
perceived quality of the results was slightly higher in the
electronic brainstorming, possibly due to a design of the
system, which did not disrupt, but rather support social in-
teraction.
From the results of this study and a number of observations
we made in the process, we inferred a list of design consid-
erations, which can help others to design future collabora-
tive systems for this kind of socio-technical settings.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank all participants of the user study for their time
and patience.
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