Dipti Mandalia

Payal Prabhu

Initial Project Proposal

Due: Monday, February 4th, 10:00am

Survey on Implementing Active Critiquing within the EDC

"A Design Critic is an intelligent user interface mechanism embedded in a design tool that analyzes a design in the context of decision-making. Feedback from critics may report design errors, point out incompleteness, suggest alternatives, or offer heuristic advice." [Robbins,J., Design Critiquing Systems]

The current EDC system implements critiquing passively in the reflection space. This does not allow for backtalk from artifacts in the action space during the design phase. We propose to survey the need for active vs. passive critiquing in the EDC system, examine levels at which critiquing may be implemented i.e. on/off high/medium/low levels, and suggest methods to implement the required level of critiquing during design phase.

The issues that we will address are:

• Need for Critiquing


• Levels of Critiquing


• Implementing Critiquing within EDC


• Critiquing without Annoying

Currently, when a stakeholder places an object on the action space there is no feedback from the system that tells him if the move is legal or not. For example, constructing a road through a building, or not having a bus-stop near a park-n-ride, is not flagged by the system to be a bad move. The stakeholder is allowed to proceed with such moves even though intuitively we know these would present problems in the reflection space. Active critiquing in the action space would enable these conflicts to be detected earlier in the design process and allow the stakeholders to deal with these issues as they arise.

We also propose that active critiquing not only correct the conflict but present all possible solutions to the problem and allow the stakeholder to choose from the solutions presented by the EDC.

On seeing the demonstration of the EDC system in class, we believe that the study of collaboration between artifacts and stakeholders is more challenging than merely between stakeholders. By incorporating critiquing in the EDC, we hope to extend the notion of "things to think with".