1. The most interesting thing about the article is the idea itself to provide this physical but on the same time computer aided environment with an initial knowledge base to facilitate collaboration among humans to solve a particular problem.
2. To my consideration the most important issue in the article was that a physical environment is effectively applicable to get people of different domains interact with each other but without computational background the whole project would leak on flexibility and people’s interest would extinguish because they would quickly discover the limits of the system.
3. I would like to know more about the strategies how to develop open systems when the designer can’t actually be aware of all the issues that can evolve by using the system.
4. I was very interested how EDC solves the problem of developing different instruments that are appropriate for different kinds of stakeholders to approach the same topic. The other interesting thing was the implementation of the action space allowing people to interact directly with the system and make their changes easily understandable to the entire group. On the other hand people can support their arguments with the help of the reflection space giving more sense to a discussion and becoming aware of the effects produced by the effectuated changes.
5. Well, it’s not closely related but there is quite a lot of research going on in the area of adaptive search agents where collaborative filtering techniques along with supervised learning are used to provide a user with contextualized information based on his preferences and habits and therefore provide a strong concept for context sensitive learning and human – computer collaboration.
6. Design is not a profession – every human who participates in a problem solving task can be a designer as long as he contributes to the finding of the solution. Learning in EDC always occurs in context by taking place on demand during the evolving of the system. On the one hand collaboration develops between humans around the action space and between humans as experts in different domains through the reflection board. On the other hand a kind of collaboration can be observed between the human and computer – the system computes results and effects as changes executed by humans take place as well as people ask the system questions about different aspects of past, current or possible future states trying to figure out the optimal way to reach a proposed goal.
7. EDC is a distributed system which offers a computer aided tool for people from different expert domains which interact with the system at different time. The system could be made more adaptable to the task and autonomous to a certain level. The capabilities of the EDC system could be extended to features that not only let the users evolve the system but allow the system itself to provide some guidance by finding dependencies and relationships between changes made by the various groups of designers in order to support more rational decisions and generally simplify solution searches. Applying the idea to an example in the planning system, EDC e.g. could notice that after the neighbors designed a bus route that fits their needs, the city planners always start by calculating the cost for the route. The system should notice this dependency and automatically present the neighbors with the expected cost for their route design to make them become aware of what will concern the planner group and therefore make the neighbor group only pass reasonable cost propositions for verification through the planner group.