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

Improving Design of Systems Supporting Creativity-intensive Processes – A Cross-industry Focus Group Evaluation

Organizations depend on the creative potential of their members to continuously develop innovative solutions. Groups commonly approach creative processes using collaborative IT. However, current design of information systems does not cater to the business processes representing the context in which groups operate. Creativity-intensive processes are a conceptualization of business processes that involve creativity. Voigt, Bergener, and Becker (2013) developed an explanatory design theory for information systems supporting creativity-intensive processes. The core component of the design theory is an information system architecture for creativity-intensive process support systems (CPSS). This paper evaluates the utility of the CPSS architecture to comprehensively support creativity-intensive processes. Three exploratory cross-industry focus groups, in which the architecture instantiation CreativeFlow was demonstrated, suggest that the features of CreativeFlow and the underlying architectural concepts are useful in supporting practitioners’ processes, especially for the support of creative group processes. However, three modifications to the CPSS architecture emerge: increased freedom for choosing individuals responsible for group tasks, differentiated authorization for creating and assigning creative group tasks, and advanced communication support for initiation of standard workflows. The evaluation further contributes recommendations for tool features and four research issues to advance system design of tools supporting creativity in business processes. The study provides insights for future information system evaluations in Design Science Research on Information Systems

Supporting Creative Group Processes: Design Principles for Appropriate Groupware

Creative work is often conducted in distributed groups. Therefore information exchange is frequentlyfacilitated by groupware systems. However, group work suffers from several losses such asinformation overload, production blocking, free riding, evaluation apprehension and productionmatching and yet has not been tailored to the need of creative work. In order to reduce these lossesand to best support creative group processes (CGP), we propose a framework which combines a) thestages of the creative process, b) the potential losses of creative group processes and c) differentmedia characteristics drawn from the Media Synchronicity Theory to formulate groupware designprinciples. We conclude that idea generation should be supported by asynchronous groupwarefunctionality whilst idea evaluation merits from synchronous functionality

Architectural Design and Prototyping of Co-PPGIS: A Groupware-Based Online Synchronous Collaborative PPGIS to Support Municipality Development and Planning Management Workflows

Co-PPGIS has a wide variety of applications like municipal planning, emergency response, public health and security, etc. The main focus of this chapter is on the development and design of a Web Collaborative PPGIS (Co-PPGIS) infrastructure. As part of municipality’s planning and management services, Co-PPGIS is developed for real-time map sharing application system. Co-PPGIS is an effective and essential online meeting system for supporting group collaborations on geographic information such as maps and imageries, and capturing and sharing of local/domain knowledge in real time. Co-PPGIS permits amalgamation of geospatial data and collaborator’s input in the form of geo-referenced notations. It incorporates coherent components as map sharing, real-time chat, video conferencing, geo-referenced textual and graphical notations. The study aims to focus on public participation and geo-collaboration facilitated with information sharing, interactive geo-conferencing, real-time map, and data sharing with tools to draw features or add annotation to the map while discussions, uploading documents, and live communication. Co-PPGIS provides an efficient and reliable platform that will significantly reduce the time to acquire, process, and analyze data. The significance of this study is to contribute to existing public participation practices, to municipal planning, to decision-making, or to geographic information science

Collaborative problem solving and program development model

A model to enhance collaborative problem solving and program development is presented. The collaborative model is a detailed cognitive model that takes into consideration the cognitive and social activities that occur during collaborative problem solving and program development. The cognitive activities required for collaborative problem solving and program development are identified and integrated into a six-stage model. An extensive literature review in the associated fields is presented to show the need for the model described in this dissertation. In addition, a comprehensive study of tools to support collaboration during problem solving and program development was also performed as well as a critique of these tools. A detailed statistical experiment to study the effect of this model on subjects, collaboratively solving a software problem was designed and executed. The experiment included testing the collaborative problem solving and program development model with and without assistance from groupware tools. The subject teams each constructed a software design and this design was evaluated based on, research hypotheses. This experiment produced results indicating the positive effect the Collaborative Model has on problem understanding and the quality of solution planning during collaborative problem solving and program development efforts

Improving User Involvement Through Live Collaborative Creation

Creating an artifact - such as writing a book, developing software, or performing a piece of music - is often limited to those with domain-specific experience or training. As a consequence, effectively involving non-expert end users in such creative processes is challenging. This work explores how computational systems can facilitate collaboration, communication, and participation in the context of involving users in the process of creating artifacts while mitigating the challenges inherent to such processes. In particular, the interactive systems presented in this work support live collaborative creation, in which artifact users collaboratively participate in the artifact creation process with creators in real time. In the systems that I have created, I explored liveness, the extent to which the process of creating artifacts and the state of the artifacts are immediately and continuously perceptible, for applications such as programming, writing, music performance, and UI design. Liveness helps preserve natural expressivity, supports real-time communication, and facilitates participation in the creative process. Live collaboration is beneficial for users and creators alike: making the process of creation visible encourages users to engage in the process and better understand the final artifact. Additionally, creators can receive immediate feedback in a continuous, closed loop with users. Through these interactive systems, non-expert participants help create such artifacts as GUI prototypes, software, and musical performances. This dissertation explores three topics: (1) the challenges inherent to collaborative creation in live settings, and computational tools that address them; (2) methods for reducing the barriers of entry to live collaboration; and (3) approaches to preserving liveness in the creative process, affording creators more expressivity in making artifacts and affording users access to information traditionally only available in real-time processes. In this work, I showed that enabling collaborative, expressive, and live interactions in computational systems allow the broader population to take part in various creative practices.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145810/1/snaglee_1.pd

A Framework for Identifying Sequences of Interactions That Cause Usability Problems in Collaborative Systems

Collaborative systems support shared spaces, where groups of users exchange interactions. In order to ensure the usability of these systems, an intuitive interactions´ organization and that each user has awareness information to know the activity of others are necessary. Usability laboratories allow evaluators to verify these requirements. However, laboratory usability evaluations can be problematic for reproducing mobile and ubiquitous contexts, as they restrict the place and time in which the user interacts with the system. This paper presents a framework for building software support that it collects human?machine interactions in mobile and ubiquitous contexts and outputs an assessment of the system´s usability. This framework is constructed through learning that is based on neural networks, identifying sequences of interactions related to usability problems when users carry out collaborative activities. The paper includes a case study that puts the framework into action during the development process of a smartphone application that supports collaborative sport betting.This research and the APC was funded by the University of Cantabria and the Government of Cantabria through the industrial doctorate grant DI27, given to Santos Bringas. Alicia Nieto-Reyes was supported by a Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades grant MTM2017-86061-C2-2-P