Digital information support for concept design

This paper outlines the issues in effective utilisation of digital resources in conceptual design. Access to appropriate information acts as stimuli and can lead to better substantiated concepts. This paper addresses the issues of presenting such information in a digital form for effective use, exploring digital libraries and groupware as relevant literature areas, and argues that improved integration of these two technologies is necessary to better support the concept generation task. The development of the LauLima learning environment and digital library is consequently outlined. Despite its attempts to integrate the designers' working space and digital resources, continuing issues in library utilisation and migration of information to design concepts are highlighted through a class study. In light of this, new models of interaction to increase information use are explored

DIDET: Digital libraries for distributed, innovative design education and teamwork. Final project report

The central goal of the DIDET Project was to enhance student learning opportunities by enabling them to partake in global, team based design engineering projects, in which they directly experience different cultural contexts and access a variety of digital information sources via a range of appropriate technology. To achieve this overall project goal, the project delivered on the following objectives: 1. Teach engineering information retrieval, manipulation, and archiving skills to students studying on engineering degree programs. 2. Measure the use of those skills in design projects in all years of an undergraduate degree program. 3. Measure the learning performance in engineering design courses affected by the provision of access to information that would have been otherwise difficult to access. 4. Measure student learning performance in different cultural contexts that influence the use of alternative sources of information and varying forms of Information and Communications Technology. 5. Develop and provide workshops for staff development. 6. Use the measurement results to annually redesign course content and the digital libraries technology. The overall DIDET Project approach was to develop, implement, use and evaluate a testbed to improve the teaching and learning of students partaking in global team based design projects. The use of digital libraries and virtual design studios was used to fundamentally change the way design engineering is taught at the collaborating institutions. This was done by implementing a digital library at the partner institutions to improve learning in the field of Design Engineering and by developing a Global Team Design Project run as part of assessed classes at Strathclyde, Stanford and Olin. Evaluation was carried out on an ongoing basis and fed back into project development, both on the class teaching model and the LauLima system developed at Strathclyde to support teaching and learning. Major findings include the requirement to overcome technological, pedagogical and cultural issues for successful elearning implementations. A need for strong leadership has been identified, particularly to exploit the benefits of cross-discipline team working. One major project output still being developed is a DIDET Project Framework for Distributed Innovative Design, Education and Teamwork to encapsulate all project findings and outputs. The project achieved its goal of embedding major change to the teaching of Design Engineering and Strathclyde's new Global Design class has been both successful and popular with students

A design recording framework to facilitate knowledge sharing in collaborative software engineering

This paper describes an environment that allows a development team to share knowledge about software artefacts by recording decisions and rationales as well as supporting the team in formulating and maintaining design constraints. It explores the use of multi-dimensional design spaces for capturing various issues arising during development and presenting this meta-information using a network of views. It describes a framework to underlie the collaborative environment and shows the supporting architecture and its implementation. It addresses how the artefacts and their meta-information are captured in a non-invasive way and shows how an artefact repository is embedded to store and manage the artefacts

Collaborative Practices that Support Creativity in Design

Design is a ubiquitous, collaborative and highly material activity. Because of the embodied nature of the design profession, designers apply certain collaborative practices to enhance creativity in their everyday work. Within the domain of industrial design, we studied two educational design departments over a period of eight months. Using examples from our fieldwork, we develop our results around three broad themes related to collaborative practices that support the creativity of design professionals: 1) externalization, 2) use of physical space, and 3) use of bodies. We believe that these themes of collaborative practices could provide new insights into designing technologies for supporting a varied set of design activities. We describe two conceptual collaborative systems derived from the results of our study

Using VCR to Support Different Styles and Types of Group Collaborations in Virtual Universities

[[abstract]]To support many different group activities such as computer and network based meeting, seminar, conference, tele-lecturing, group project, team work, student instruction and club in a virtual university, a general framework based on a room metaphor or model is used to develop a desktop groupware system, called virtual collaboration room (VCR) that enables teachers and students to flexibly and naturally conduct their collaborative teaching/learning/working over the Internet without constraints on collaboration type, working style, group scale and system platform. As important component in our integrated educational system, University21, the VCR is discussed how to be employed and managed in a virtual university. With the use of Java applets for system implementations, users can enter the VCR from any standard Java enabled Web browser. VCR consists of user panel, object cabinet, object panel, a variety of objects in workspace, workspace panel. An object in VCR has a life cycle from birth, alive to death, and attributes such as owner, state, access mode, handler, and persistence. To further improve the quality of collaborations, natural object control and rich awareness function are fully supported.[[notice]]補正完

Sketch-Based Interfaces to Support Collaborative Conceptual Design Learning

In order to gain a better understanding of online collaborative conceptual design processes this paper investigates how student designers make use of Lyceum, a shared virtual synchronous environment when engaged in conceptual design. The software enables users to talk to each other and share sketches when they are remotely located. The paper describes a novel methodology for observing and analysing collaborative design processes by adapting the concepts of grounded theory. Rather than concentrating on narrow aspects of the final artefacts, emerging 'themes' are generated that provide a broader picture of collaborative design process and context descriptions. Findings on the themes of 'grounding – mutual understanding' and 'support creativity' complement findings from other research, while important themes associated with 'near-synchrony' have not been emphasised in other research. From the study, a series of design recommendations are made for the development of tools to support online computer-supported collaborative work in design using a shared virtual environment

The provision of education and training for healthcare professionals through the medium of the internet

This paper describes a new initiative to provide Internet based courses to student and professional occupational therapists in four centres in the UK, Belgium the Netherlands and Sweden. The basis of this collaborative Occupational Therapy Internet School (OTIS) is the concept of the “Virtual College”. This comprises the design and implementation of a sophisticated Internet-based system through which courses can be managed, prepared and delivered online in an effective fashion, and where students can communicate both with the staff and their peers. The aim is to support and facilitate the whole range of educational activities within a remote electronic environment. A major feature of the course organisation is the adoption of a problem-based approach in which students will collaborate internationally to propose effective intervention in given case study scenarios. The paper outlines the rationale for OTIS, the content and structure of the courseware, the technical specification of the system and evaluation criteria. In addition to the more conventional web-based learning facilities generally offered, a number of agent-based approaches are being adopted to assist in the management of the course by ensuring the proper delivery of course materials and to assist the functioning of project groups. </p

Towards Principles and Project Memories for Distributed-Design Information Storing in Engineering Design Education

The issues of distributed working are many, with problems relating to information access and information acquisition the most common (Crabtree et al., 1997). Little prescription or guidance on information management exists for designers (Culley et al., 1999). This thesis examines how engineering design students store information in distributed team-based project work. From these findings a set of guiding Principles for distributed-design information storing (d-DIS) are developed to support students undertaking distributed project work and to better prepare them for their role as graduate engineers in an ever increasingly international and globalised market. The thesis also presents the development of the concept of Project Memories, shared information spaces. It is crucial to provide an archive or repository that functions as a collective memory in order to support distributed design collaboration

COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COLLABORATIVE KNOWLEDGE BUILDING IN ENGINEERING DESIGN

Engineering design is defined as a process of devising a technical system, component, or process to satisfy desired needs. Collaborative engineering design (CED) is a knowledge- intensive process that involves multidisciplinary people working jointly, sharing resources and outcomes, and building new knowledge while solving problems. People need to collaborate synchronously or asynchronously, either in the same place or distributed geographically. This thesis proposes that engineering design can be modeled not only as a process of knowledge transformation, but as a process of collaborative knowledge building (CKB). CKB is a goal-driven collaborative process of generating and refining ideas and concepts of value to the community. Properly applied and supported, CKB has the potential to improve both learning and design outcomes resulting from collaborative design projects. Existing collaboration tools have evolved without a clear understanding of designers’ needs, even though a portion of the required functionalities has been achieved separately. This thesis proposes an integrated CKB-orientated model for collaborative engineering design, incorporating the key elements of Stahl’s CKB model, Lu’s ECN-based collaborative engineering model, Nonaka’s knowledge creation theory, and Sim and Duffy’s model of a design activity. Based on the model, a set of specific requirements for collaboration tools are presented and some functionalities not existing currently are identified