Towards computer supported cooperative design

This thesis first reviews the literature about the nature of cooperative design activity and its technological support. It is noted that knowledge of how designers work together in real-world settings is less than complete. Moreover, after over a decade of developments in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, the state-of-the-art in collaborative technology does not fully support such activities. Two substantial case studies are presented. The first draws upon fieldwork with designers at a large, distributed engineering design company, where a pilot study of collaborative technologies was carried out, focusing on the organisational context for such interventions and the reasons behind the qualified success of the experimental technology. In the light of the lack of use of synchronous tools in particular, a second case study was carried out. This was a complementary analysis of face-to-face co-working in a series of meetings held by a small design group. The results of both pieces of fieldwork are analysed in the context of existing studies of designers in both real-world and laboratory settings. This leads to the identification of a number of important characteristics of cooperative design, some newly identified, others confirming or extending the results of existing work. They include the identification of tension between traditional engineering design culture and the underlying assumptions of new technology; the intrinsic difficulties in sharing some types of design artefacts; and the way in which design entails an interweaving of individual and group activity, with consequences for resource exploitation, distributed cognition and workspace navigation in group sessions. The findings are integrated into an organising framework for cooperative design, with emphasis on the support of coworking designers distributed across multiple sites. Current technologies are reviewed against scenarios based on the framework and recommendations are made for further work

Applicability of HCI Techniques to Systems Interface Design

PhDThis thesis seeks to identify reasons why HCI techniques are unsuitable for application in real world design projects. User-oriented systems design and evaluation require that many considerations such as the psychology of users, the applications and target tasks be born in mind simultaneously. A selection of influential HCI design and evaluative techniques from HCI research literature are reviewed and characterised in terms of their analytic scope. Two studies of systems designers' approaches to user-oriented design and evaluation were carried out in order to gain a clearer picture of the design process as it occurs in applied and commercial projects. It was found that designers frequently lack adequate information about users, carrying Out, at best, informal user-evaluations of prototypes. Most notably HCI design and evaluative techniques, of the type common in the literature, are not being used in applied and commercial design practice. They seem to be complex, often limited in scope, and possessed of inadequate or unrepresentative views of the design process within which they might be applied. It was noted that design practice is highly varied with only a small number of common goal directed classes of activity being identified. These together with observed user-oriented information sources and design constraints provide a useful schema for viewing applied and commercial design practice. A further study of HCI specialists' practice in commercial environments was undertaken, in order to identify particular user-oriented design approaches and HCI techniques suitable for application in practice. The specialists were able to describe desirable, and undesirable properties of the techniques they used which made it possible to identify a list of specific desirable features for HCI techniques. A framework for assessing applicability of HCI techniques was developed from the findings of the thesis. This is demonstrated using an example project from the design studies and may prove valuable in supporting design, evaluation, critiquing and selection of HCI techniques

Empirical assessment of patterns and guidelines for web design.

The phenomenal and explosive growth of the internet makes the need for proven, dependable approaches to interaction and interface design more important. Efficient and effective design methods are needed, complete with appropriate techniques and tools that support designers in developing and delivering usable systems. Knowledge and experience significantly contribute to producing better design products. Traditionally, design knowledge and experience is conveyed in the form of guidelines. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in design patterns as an effective way of capturing and communicating design knowledge.This thesis contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the benefits of patterns, as they are contrasted to another form of design guidance in the field of web design. The thesis investigates the effect of patterns and guidelines in the development of skills of students acting as novice designers. The aim is to empirically test how patterns and guidelines affect novice designers in creating and evaluating a web site. Its motivation is to advance the understanding of how novices employ and value patterns and guidelines after being introduced to usability issues with the help of these tools. Moreover, this study also highlighted participants' attitudes and preferences towards patterns and guidelines.Three experiments were conducted for the purposes of this research. Each experiment contributed significantly to the understanding of how the next experiment should be carried out, and the findings and lessons learned at each stage have extensively influenced the next stage. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to collect and analyze data. Detailed descriptions of the experimental procedures are provided and give insights into the use of patterns and guidelines by novices. The results indicate that patterns and guidelines can successfully communicate usability principles and knowledge to novice designers and can affect the design and evaluation skills of participants.The difference in the overall scores in the design task between the two groups, using subjective and objective metrics, is statistically significant with the patterns group performing better. Results from the design task and the interviews suggest that compound patterns are inferior to simple patterns and do not create a clear picture of all the usability issues involved to novice designers. There is no significant difference between the performances of the two groups in the evaluation task. However, if a comparison is made using difficult to identify errors the patterns group perform significantly better than the guidelines group.The overwhelming preference for a particular format in presenting guidance is patterns even by the participants trained with guidelines. Links to other patterns within the pattern collection and pattern names are not appreciated by participants, although guideline titles are considered to provide useful information and guidance. Patterns are considered by participants as better tools to introduce design principles to novices while guidelines are perceived as tools for more experienced designers. At the same time patterns are suggested as a useful pedagogic tool for teaching.Overall the study represents an important fist step towards comparing patterns with another similar tool for providing guidance to designers. Development of original experimental designs was required since no similar studies have been conducted. The work of this thesis can serve as a starting point for more thorough assessment of design patterns and their potential benefits in designing more usable interfaces and in education as a tool for knowledge transfer and training

Legal Design for the General Data Protection Regulation. A Methodology for the Visualization and Communication of Legal Concepts

Privacy policies are known to be impenetrable, lengthy, tedious texts that are hardly read and poorly understood. Therefore, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduces provisions to enhance the transparency of such documents and suggests icons as visual elements to provide “in an easily visible, intelligible and clearly legible manner a meaningful overview of the intended processing.” The present dissertation discusses how design, and in particular legal design, can support the concrete implementation of the GDPR’s transparency obligation. Notwithstanding the many benefits that visual communication demonstrably provides, graphical elements do not improve comprehension per se. Research on graphical symbols for legal concepts is still scarce, while both the creation and consequent evaluation of icons depicting abstract or unfamiliar concepts represent a challenge. More- over, precision of representation can support the individuals’ sense-making of the meaning of graphical symbols, but at the expense of simplicity and us- ability. Hence, this research proposed a methodology that combines semantic web technologies with principles of semiotics and ergonomics, and empirical methods drawn from the emerging discipline of legal design, that was used to create and evaluate DaPIS, the Data Protection Icon Set meant to support the data subjects’ navigation of privacy policies. The icon set is modeled on PrOnto, an ontological representation of the GDPR, and is organized around its core modules: personal data, roles and agents, processing operations, processing purposes, legal bases, and data subjects’ rights. In combination with the description of a privacy policy in the legal standard XML Akoma Ntoso, such an approach makes the icons machine-readable and semi-automatically retrievable. Icons can thus serve as information markers in lengthy privacy statements and support the navigation of the text by the data subject

Game design research: an introduction to theory & practice

Design research is an active academic field covering disciplines such as architecture, graphic, product, service, interaction, and systems design. Design research aims to understand not only the designed end products but also how design as an activity unfolds. The book demonstrates different approaches to design research in game design research

Designing for self-transcendent experiences in virtual reality

This thesis contributes to Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research with a focus on the design of immersive experiences that support self-transcendence. Self-transcendence is defined as a decrease in a sense of self and a increase in unity with the world. It can change what individuals know and value, their perspective on the world and life, evolving them as a grown person. Consequently, self-transcendence is gaining attention in Psychology, Philosophy, and Neuroscience. But, we are still far from understanding the complex phenomenological and neurocognitive aspects of self-transcendence, as well as its implications for individual growth and psychological well-being. In reviewing the methods for studying self-transcendence, we found differing conceptual models determine different ways for understanding and studying self-transcendence. Understanding self-transcendence is made especially challenging because of its ineffable qualities and extraordinary conditions in which it takes place. For that reason, researchers have began to look at technological solutions for both eliciting self-transcendence to better study it under controlled and replicable conditions as well as giving people greater access to the experience. We reviewed immersive, interactive technologies that aim to support positive experiences such as self-transcendence and extracted a set of design considerations that were prevalent across experiences. We then explored two different focuses of self-transcendence: awe and lucid dreaming. First, we took an existing VR experience designed specifically to support the self-transcendent experience of awe and looked at how the mindset and physical setting surrounding that VR experience might better support the experience of and accommodation of awe. Second, we delved deep into lucid dreaming to better understand the aspects that could help inform the design of an immersive experience that supports self-transcendence. We put those design ideas into practice by developing a neurofeedback system that aims to support lucid dreaming practices in an immersive experience. Through these review papers and design explorations, we contribute to the understanding of how one might design and evaluate immersive technological experiences that support varieties of self-transcendence. We hope to inspire more work in this area that holds promise in better understanding human nature and living our best lives

Design+ : organizational renewal and innovation through design

The products, services, technologies, ecosystems, and networks of today are much more interconnected and complicated than ever before. As a result, private and public organizations alike are turning to design to find new ways to create value, manage uncertainty and innovate in a sustainable manner. Design can play a variety of roles on different levels in organizations, with different effects. This book offers an overview on how design and design thinking can change our organizations, drawing from academic research and company experiences in different industries. We showcase different perspectives and approaches, and hope to inspire you to explore the opportunities through which design can help to renew your own ways of working

Digitally mediated design : using computer programming to develop a personal design process

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (p. 242-251).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.This thesis is based on the proposal that the current system of architectural design education confuses product and process. Students are assessed through, and therefore concentrate on, the former whilst the latter is left in many cases to chance. This thesis describes a new course taught by the author at M IT for the last three years whose aim is to teach the design process away from the complexities inherent in the studio system. This course draws a parallel between the design process and the Constructionist view of learning, and asserts that the design process is a constant learning activity. Therefore, learning about the design process necessarily involves learning the cognitive skills of this theoretical approach to education. These include concrete thinking and the creation of external artifacts to develop of ideas through iterative, experimental, incremental exploration. The course mimics the Constructionist model of using the computer programming environment LOGO to teach mathematics. It uses computer programming in a CAD environment, and specifically the development of a generative system, to teach the design process. The efficacy of such an approach to architectural design education has been studied using methodologies from educational research. The research design used an emergent qualitative model, employing Maykut and Morehouse's "interpretive descriptive" approach (Maykut & Morehouse, 1994) and Glaser and Strauss's Constant Comparative Method of data analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Six students joined the course in the Spring 1999 semester. The experience of these students, what and how they learned, and whether this understanding was transferred to other areas of their educational process, were studied. The findings demonstrated that computer programming in a particular pedagogical framework, can help transform the way in which students understand the process of designing. The following changes were observed in the students during the course of the year: Development of understanding of a personalized design process; move from using computer programming to solve quantifiable problems to using it to support qualitative design decisions; change in understanding of the paradigm for computers in the design process; awareness of the importance of intra personal and interpersonal communication skills; change in expectations of, their sense of control over, and appropriation of, the computer in the design process; evidence of transference of cognitive skills; change from a Behaviourist to a Constructionist model of learning.by Megan Yakeley.Ph.D