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Transcending the Individual Human Mind - Creating Shared Understanding through Collaborative Design 1.1 The most interesting part of this article is the synergy between the action space and the reflection space, implemented in EDC. While this synergy shows exactly what happens in real-world human behaviors, the physical separation of the two spaces allows action activities and reflection activities to happen concurrently. This separation also explicitly reminds users the existence of the other space while they are working on one space, therefore reminding them to take advantage of it. Second, the concept of "open system" is very interesting though not new. How to design/implement an open system is a tough question since we can never totally predict the future. The best we could do is to get as much understanding as we can of the application domain and make the system at least more open than today's closed systems. The third, but not the last, interesting part of this article is that EDC is a highly interactive environment. Being highly interactive is one of the most desirable features of future computer systems. EDC did some explorations on this issue and the results turned out well. 1.2 In the overall, this article is easy to read and understand. I am just a little confused about the EDC layered architecture. The three layers make sense. Other than that, I donĄ¯t see the link between this EDC layered architecture and other parts of the article. Maybe this architecture has significant meanings, though they are not obvious in this article. 2. The main message of this article is that the future of HCI is more challenging than before and we need to develop innovative information technologies to support collaborative design and learning in domains characterized by complex problems. I totally agree with many points given in this article, e.g. the HCI research community should not confine itself to a consumer role, what we can build is more limited by our imagination, our ability to discover and our ability to envision than by our system development limitations. 3. HCI is an interdisciplinary domain. How can we make people from different domains to effectively collaborate is a very challenging question. This article doesnĄ¯t talk much on that. I would like to see more about it. 4. refer to 1.1 5. The idea of EDC system, in some way, is similar to digital libraries and community-ware where human collaboration is important and the system is open. 6. The whole point is to design information technologies to support collaborative design and learning. Complex design problems are so complex that learning and human collaboration are critical. EDC is an environment designed for designers, or urban planners. The combination of the physical models and computational models make the system more intuitive and easy to use. It also nicely matches the way people collaborate in a real-world setting. The integration of the action space and reflection space is another great feature of EDC, which allows people to learn and design. 7. In terms of the possible extension of EDC, I am thinking along the line of distributed group collaboration. Currently, EDC targets face-to-face group. How about a distributed group? The reason is simple. First of all, it is hard to get people together. Second, we can have more people join the meeting. In our last class, we already experienced one limitation of EDC that only a small number of people can stand around the PiTaBoard at the same time. The group could be distributed in various ways, therefore leading to different modes of collaboration. Here are two examples. 1) Most of the group is in one site and an expert is joining the meeting remotely. 2) The whole group consists of two subgroups, each in one site. In the first example, the face-to-face group plays the major role while the expert mainly listens and gives suggestions. Therefore, the group could be working in the current EDC environment, while the expert needs a simpler environment where he could see what is happening in the other site, communicate with people and do some simple operations. The collaboration in the second example is more interleaving. One possibility is that each sub-group is working on a PiTaBoard. Then how to coordinate the behaviors of the two sub-groups is an issue. Supporting distributed groups for collaborative design is not simple, but the benefits are huge and the demands are emerging. |
