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I. Précis We are investigating collaborative environments that support early phase design. A detailed project proposal outlining the theoretical motivation and conceptual framework can be accessed below (III. Background Research). The concept is to have a dynamic website which specifically supports brainstorming sessions of which early phase design is our priority. This Independent Research phase will review existing environments/methods used in brainstorming sessions. II. Framework A wiki type portal is our current design. The environment will support scratch pad style note-taking - both graphically and standard text support, persistence and tracking for workspaces and sessions. Real-time synchronicity might be difficult to implement in the given time frame and not a priority at this point. Multiple users log into this portal and can start/join a brainstorming session. (1) Users work/interact primarily with their personal workspaces and have an option project (merge) or directly edit to public design space while
(2) Tracking and Indexing sessions will be a priority. An embedded search engine (Microsoft Live/Google) will provide immediate access (without having to navigate away from the workspace) to previous sessions or any information the participants need to research. A database will enforce version control. (3) Post-It feature in the interface design, which can support both sketch and text, as well as images and URLs. (4) Designers can:
(5) Accordingly, the system can:
III. Background Research (1) The problems addressed by the proposed research Successful teamwork is essential for different types of design, such as architecture design, graphics design, product design and game design etc. The need of collaboration may come from the large scale or the demanding deadline of a project. Some designs with disciplinary nature also call for teamwork because they require designers with different experience and expertise. As a chaotic system, the design process is bounded and sensitive to the initial conditions, which means early stage design is crucial and constrains the scope of design. For an individual designer, early stage design is already a complex and divergent thinking process. So how does a design team communicate ideas at the early design stage to develop these initial conditions and reach some consensus? Based on these preliminary foci, the team will be able to develop the project further towards their desired direction. People have realized the importance of the early design stage, which is an extremely active process of creative thinking. But many prevalent CAD systems use explicit geometrical and mathematical representations, which make them suitable only for the final stages of design. Since these systems are basically task-centered instead of human-centered, they have limited functions and unpleasant features to support the early design. Users are led to think in geometrical or usage details, while the creativity or personality, which is the spirit of design world, needs much more vague representations. Doubtless, people expect more from teamwork compared to individual work. As to teamwork at early design stage, beyond simply allocating work and meeting requirements of a design, does teamwork produce more on creativity? Ideally one could obtain inspirations from ideas and perspectives of other team members. But is it possible that teamwork suppresses individual creativity or under what conditions it will bring more emergent creativity? How do thinking streams develop and interact with each other? There is nested complexity: design thinking is cognitive complex while the collaboration is contextual complex. Because of the complexity, we would like to confine the research to the early design stage, for example, schematic design in architectural design process. The design process is inherently unpredictable over long periods of time while designers usually appreciate this vagueness in early phase. Is there a more intuitive way to cater free mind to communication effectively? Can we build a design collaborative environment with this blur feature? The system with this vision is preferred because it could bring designers together, while in current situation design collaboration sometimes can be highly time-consuming and frustrating. (2) Methods or overall approach of the researchers Brainstorming is a popular method to develop highly creative solutions to a problem. In order to facilitate the early stage design, we intend to build a communication system: Design Brainstorming Board (DBB), which is a brainstorming network preferred by a team of 2-12 members to explore creative ideas at the beginning of a design project. Experimental research indicates that people in face-to face brainstorming meetings are less efficient at generating ideas than when working alone. DBB provides a way to perform remote brainstorming so that it can reduce physical (presence) meeting and improve meeting efficiency. It also enables multi-level privacy to support multi-level design thinking environment: individual brainstorming –private, semi-private and group brainstorming - public. Since team members may have different experience and expertise, they will choose common representations to fulfill collaboration designers. We choose visual expression and natural language for communication, which may or may not be explicit in the representation. As a natural way of thinking, the communication by sketching will be supported. Even though current computational image processing ability cannot couple human’s ability to understand a sketch, designers can use natural language to add annotation and exchange their understandings through DBB. With digital pen, tablet PC or other periphery devices, freehand diagrams and pictures by sketching can be viewed, stored and retrieved with either static image or animation format. People can work on the same craft at the same time and the sketch can differentiate strokes from different members. Similar to brainstorming by text, sketches are another representation of ideas, in which case descriptive annotation can be made when proceeding idea reduction. Brainstorming has two phases: idea generation and idea reduction. The Post-Its simulator allows user to type in word fragments and stick them to the virtual white board. Then users can move these notes around to group, prune and rank ideas. As the collaboration process, the DBB is able to do word-based study and document-based study. The word-based study is to track words which are used by the team and how they evolve to the latest ideas. The document-based study is to track the history of each word or graphic document to show the evolvement path and collaboration path of the design under working. All information has a complete record including creation record and visit record. Relationships can be set up if new ideas are inspired by previous ideas. (3) Benefits anticipated from this collaboration Design Brainstorming Board is not only a design communication platform by which designers can cook up creative ideas but also a research platform by which we are able to investigate the possible interaction dynamics during the early design stage. DBB also makes it possible to observe and evaluate individual involvement and contribution in a teamwork design process. The main purpose of Design Brainstorming Board is to create an open design collaborative design environment by combining human and artificial intelligence. It gives designers large freedom to implement self-organization, which will encourage new design practices.
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