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Design, Learning, and Collaboration Assignment 7 Jon Marbach Serina and Dipti, I'm working on this right now. Keep checking back for updates - Jon (email me if you need anything or want to yell at me for not having it done! At the moment though, I'm going to grab some cough drops...) OK, all done! 1a. what did you find interesting about the article? I'm glad I answered these questions out of order because as I was answering question 4, I realized that currently, the only critiquing mechanisms are the generic kind. Allowing critiquing for a specific project or from a specific point of view is a new take on the issue. If you right click on a sentence that has been flagged by the grammar checker, Microsoft Word might tell you "That sentence would be more persuasive if it were written in active voice rather than passive voice." This doesn't take into account whether or not you are trying to be persuasive! A system that lets you get feedback about a design from different perspectives would allow you to focus more directly on specific aspects. Looking at the design of a building, for example, you might want to think about just the cost aspect. Then you might want to switch to considering aesthetic issues, or heat flow, or structural soundness. You might even want to get critical information from two perspectives simultaneously to compare the tradeoffs between them. 1b. what did you find not interesting about the article? This is more a point of debate than a not interesting part, but I think one has to be careful with criticsm so that suggestions are not taken blindly. The article does address this, in providing further explanations behind a critique, and I agree with that approach. My concern is that would a user think less critically about the design if he/she assumes that the computer is taking care of that for them? I'm getting this from the debate-style of writing used in some philisophical writings. I was always suspicious that the presentation of a counter argument could be a sneaky way of suppressing the reader's own argumentative process. The arguments made could distract you from a flaw by making you focus on one that has been handed to you. I don't think this is a serious issue, I just wanted to throw it out there to be thought about.... 2. what do you consider the main message of the article? The article demonstrates that embedded, domain oriented critiquing mechanisms can be an integral and highly benficial part of the design process in solving complex problems. 3. are there themes discussed in the article which you would like to know more about? I'm curious to know what kind of design rules form the basis of critiquing for the Voice Dialog Design Environment? I've heard so many bad telephone menu systems! 4. do you know of other papers, ideas, and systems which are closely related to DODEs The big one that comes to mind is Microsoft's Agent technology in its office applications. The one moment that struck me, and this only happened once, was when I was writing a paper and the agent came up and said "It looks like you're writing a business letter. Do you want some help?". The other Microsoft feature in VisualStudio is pop-up method and property boxes. If you haven't seen this before, it's pretty handy. Let's say you have a window object myWin. When you type "myWin.", a pop-up menu appears to the upper right of the dot, listing all the methods and properties of that class. As you continue to type, the box tracks to the closest alphabetical match. At any point you can hit the next character you would normally type after the method/property name (usually "=", " " or "(") and the environment, completes the word for you. So "myWin.c(" expands to "myWin.close(". I realize this is not totally unique, but very useful! Critiquing? I know many code editors color-code the code for you. I use VisualBasic quite a bit which highlights lines with syntax errors in red. Now that I think about it, it has an option (which I turned off right away) that pops up a message box when it finds a syntax error. The box tells you what the error is and then has a help button which you can use to find out more about the error. That whole mechanism is more like what is discussed in the paper tha I realized! 5. what does the article say about design It is a complex activity of which critique is a critical part. learning Critics can support learning-on-demand by providing in depth reasons for a critique. collaboration Critics can allow you to collaborate by displaying previous solutions to a specific design issue. innovative media support for these activities? The HYDRA system ties all of these concepts together nicely. 6. do you have any ideas how this research could / should be extended based on your own knowledge and experience? For one thing, it seems like this could be applied to all sorts of architectural domains. A bigger question would be if this could/should be applied to the arts, where the critiquing process is critical to one's artistic development. The paper mentions this a bit, but the designer should, if they do override the suggestion of the critic, provide a rationale that may be referred to by others using the system later. Someone may come up with a good point to counter a critics reasons. Assignment 7 Summary
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