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Dipti Mandalia Assignment 1 Review of the article: 'Transcending the Individual Human Mind- Creating Shared Understanding through Collaborative Design' 1. What did you find 1.Interesting about the article The article identifies the problems faced by the HCI community with extreme clarity. Moreover through the EDC the article also tries to address these problems. It emphasizes on the application of collaboration to design. It presents a different perspective of learning, design and collaboration and explains how these three concepts can be integrated to bring about social creativity. It acknowledges the fact that most computational media developers do not acknowledge: knowledge cannot be created in isolation and that creativity is enhanced with collaboration of individuals with other individuals as well as artifacts. 2. not interesting about the paper. There was nothing in particular about the paper that was not interesting. 2. What did you consider the main message of the article? The paper emphasizes on the importance of collaboration and interaction in design and learning. The collaboration that enhances the quality of the designed product and the design activity in general, need not necessarily be between individuals. The forms of collaboration advocated in this article are of two types: among individuals as well as between individuals and the work environment. The article suggests that the existence of symmetry of ignorance should be exploited by making the consumer the developer. Also the paper draws out the idea that construction of knowledge during the design process is best facilitated by collaboration because, when individuals collaborate different perspectives of the problem as well as alternatives for the solution can be explored. 3. Are there themes in the article that you would like to know more about? In the article, while discussing the contribution of the EDC, the authors are always discussing/assuming that the stakeholders or designers in general, more often than not come to a consensus on the design issues. However it may so happen during the design process that the views and ideas of the members of the community of interest (as would be in the example of the EDC) do not converge. In the face of such a problem would it not be a better solution or approach if there would be a 'head of the group' concept or some element in the system itself that would help the community arrive at a informed compromise. So conceptually, does this collaborative approach to design sometime backfire because if it were not for this approach, designers would follow the general design patterns and in that case at least optimize for the general case. 2. What did you find interesting about the 'Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory' system. In the conceptualization of the EDC, the idea that people react only when they act is central. This is the most intriguing feature of the EDC according to me. Though computational models can be interactive, physical models give the stakeholders a better sense of participation. The EDC strikes a balance between the two models. Another interesting aspect of the EDC is the presence of the reflection space. It not only captures the new knowledge that is generated as a result of the design process but also contextualizes information and presents it in the problem solving context. This enhances the creation of shared understanding, improves the quality of the design process and also integrates the different perspectives of the problem. The link to the argumentation space is another interesting feature of the reflection space. 3. What does the article say about 1. Design: design problems are wicked problems. During the design process it is not possible to arrive to a single solution but is only possible to arrive to an informed compromise. Also the domain of design is such that changes occur over a long time scale. The main challenges in this domain are trying to integrate the various perspectives of the stakeholders and to manage the large amount of knowledge and to contextualise it to suit the problem-solving context. It also advocates exploiting the symmetry of ignorance in order to enhance the design process and the quality of the designed artifacts. 2. Learning: the article refutes the validity of the common belief that learning ends with school. It is of the view that learning is an on going process that never ends. It views learning as collaborative knowledge construction. The article proposes that even during design process the stakeholders are learning and this knowledge helps them improve the design process. 3. Collaboration: the article emphasizes on the importance of collaboration, especially in design. It sees collaboration as a way in which new knowledge can be constructed and also as a way in which design process can be improved. This is supported by the argument that different perspectives of the problems as well as different alternatives of the solution can be explored better if the stakeholders collaborate in the design process. This way the tacit aspects of the problems are uncovered. Collaboration also helps to exploit the symmetry of ignorance of the stakeholders. This leads to the idea that consumers should be made developers. The article presents two types of collaborations: between individuals and between individuals and artifacts. 4. Innovative media support for these activities: the EDC system uses one form of innovative physical media for design, learning and collaboration. It maps physical objects to computational and strikes a balance between the two models. Thus I would say that the article advocates the use of physical models over computational models since these are more interactive and provide a better sense of participation to the stakeholders. They provide the stakeholders 'things to think with' and give a more real environment to work with. Another important form of innovative medium that is discussed in this article is the website that is used for the organizational memory of the system as well as the reflection space. 6. Do you know of any other papers ideas and systems that are correlated to the EDC. Papers: 1. Communities of Interest: Learning through Interactions of Multiple Knowledge Systems: Gerhard Fischer. 2. Knowledge Management: Problems, Promises, Realities and Challenges: Gerhard Fischer and Jonathan Ostwald. 3. Lifelong Learning- More than Training: Gerhard Fischer. Projects: 1. Mobility for All Project: this is going to use the EDC as a design substrate. 7. Do you have any ideas how this research could/should be extended? The article identifies extensibility as one of the important characteristics of any of the environments like the EDC. So the most important idea that I think should be incorporated in the EDC is that the user should be able to extend/customize the system (at least the lay user) with English-like sentences. It should be necessary that the user should know how to program in any of the languages used for system implementation. Another thing that can be incorporated in the system is 'critiquing'. In the current system, the reflection space does provide some form of basic critiquing; for example the cars show up in case the wait time at the bus stop is too long. However this is something that the system computes from the survey that is filled by the stakeholders. However the system does not have any critiquing incorporated in itself. Some facilities like providing alternative ideas in case of there is divergence of opinions within the stakeholders, extracting earlier design models from something like a catalog so that stakeholders can see if they want to take any ideas from the previous community etc should be incorporated in the system. Another example in which critiquing could be useful would be when the designers are making some fundamental errors in the design process; for example when a bus stop is too far from a house just placed etc.
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