Domain-Oriented Design Environment and Critiquing

1. What did you find interesting about the article?
   
   Having talked about different representations of the same problem and how some representations help stakeholders understand the problem better, I believe the HYDRA-Kitchen is an excellent representation of an environment in which embedded-critiquing works well. The three kinds of critics generic, specific and interpretive and their roles in the stages of critiquing were explained very well.




2. What did you find not interesting about the article?
   
   The article briefly presented the coding-scheme for generic critics, which although a little abstract at first, seemed to make sense upon reexamining. However, the same coding-scheme was not presented for specific and interpretive critics, so it made me wonder what purpose the (generic critic coding-scheme) served.




3. What do you consider the main message of the article?
   
   I believe the article demonstrated the need for critiquing and how embedding such critiquing within design environments satisfied many shortcomings present in "stand-alone" critiquing systems.




4. What are the themes discusses in the article which you would like to know about?
   
   Since Dipti and I are going to base our class project on embedded critics within the EDC, I think this paper is a good starting point for us to understand where and how we can package (and embed) critics, what roles they will play (the exact critiquing mechanism and what/how they will suggest/critic the system). I do not have any particular questions about the HYDRA-kitchen example.




5. Do you know of other papers, ideas, and systems which are closely related to DODEs and/or critiquing?
   
   Yes, some of the papers that discuss critiquing (maybe not embedded ones) are:
   
   
   • The Cognitive Ergonomics of Knowledge-Based Design Support Systems (Tammy Sumner et. al.) uses critiquing in a phone-based interface design to see how critics would help in that domain
     
   • Supporting Evaluation in Design (Tammy Sumner et. al.) presents a good understanding of how critiquing systems influence designers of different domain-skill levels
     
   • Real-time Critiquing of Integrated Diagnosis/Therapy Plans (Abigail Gertner) discusses critiquing in domains where reasoning, planning and action are interleaved and what these demands these characteristics place on critics
     
   • Critiquing: Effective Decision Support in Time-Critical Domains (Abigail Gertner) presents TraumaAID as a system that requires critiquing within a giving time-limit
     
   NOTE: Tammy Sumner and Abigail Gertner have a few dozen other papers based on critiquing. I do not know of any other papers related to DODEs.
   




6. What does the article say about design, learning, collaboration, and innovative media support for these activities?
   
   As in the previous few papers we have read for class, this paper emphasis the interplay between the design/learning/collaboration phases. It demonstrates the dynamic nature of the design environment and the demands it places on the stakeholders, the process of continuous learning while moving from one phase to another (and also by using critics), and finally the collaboration between stakeholders (expert and novice) to come to an agreement on a system design. Embedded critiquing is one such (innovative media) system that helps bring these three (DLC) characteristics together.




7. Do you have any ideas how this research could/should be extended based on your own knowledge and experience?
   
   Our (Dipti and mine) project aims to apply embedded critiquing to the EDC system and I believe this would be a good application domain into which we can extend the idea of embedded critics.

Assignment 7 Summary