On the development of idShare, a platform to support interaction design activities of small co-located teams

Externalizations and boundary objects are crucial for effectively communicating between stakeholders in multidisciplinary design teams. Especially when discussing ideas for new interactions, practitioners are increasingly finding themselves in need of new tools that allow them to rapidly, easily and more explicitly describe the dynamically changing aspects of their designs. For this purpose, we are investigating, in collaboration with the design departments of three industrial companies, the development and evaluation of a platform to support co-located (interaction) design activities. Previous research has already resulted in innovations in both hardware and software infrastructure, and in this workshop paper we therefore mostly report on some recent and planned activities towards a more coherent vision for an environment that we have named idShare. This is an interactive space that consists of two areas, an area for individual work and an area for the coordination of collaborative activities. In this paper we describe the aim and motivation of our research, the current stage of the development of the tools, and the design process and evaluations that are conducted in collaboration with the industrial partners

On the development of idShare, a platform to support interaction design activities of small co-located teams

Externalizations and boundary objects are crucial for effectively communicating between stakeholders in multidisciplinary design teams. Especially when discussing ideas for new interactions, practitioners are increasingly finding themselves in need of new tools that allow them to rapidly, easily and more explicitly describe the dynamically changing aspects of their designs. For this purpose, we are investigating, in collaboration with the design departments of three industrial companies, the development and evaluation of a platform to support co-located (interaction) design activities. Previous research has already resulted in innovations in both hardware and software infrastructure, and in this workshop paper we therefore mostly report on some recent and planned activities towards a more coherent vision for an environment that we have named idShare. This is an interactive space that consists of two areas, an area for individual work and an area for the coordination of collaborative activities. In this paper we describe the aim and motivation of our research, the current stage of the development of the tools, and the design process and evaluations that are conducted in collaboration with the industrial partners

Requirements for Supporting Individual Human Creativity in the Design Domain

International audienceCreativity is an important activity in many professional and leisure domains. This article presents a first step towards a system which will provide a set of tools for enhancing the individual creative abilities of the user in a design task. We have identified aspects which are characterise individual creativity: motivation, domain knowledge, externalization, inspiration and analogies, and requirements handling. Based on these aspects we have defined requirements and suggest associated system functionalities

Requirements Engineering as Creative Problem Solving: A Research Agenda for Idea Finding

This vision paper frames requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. Its purpose is to enable requirements researchers and practitioners to recruit relevant theories, models, techniques and tools from creative problem solving to understand and support requirements processes more effectively. It uses 4 drivers to motivate the case for requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. It then maps established requirements activities onto one of the longest-established creative problem solving processes, and uses these mappings to locate opportunities for the application of creative problem solving in requirements engineering. The second half of the paper describes selected creativity theories, techniques, software tools and training that can be adopted to improve requirements engineering research and practice. The focus is on support for problem and idea finding - two creative problem solving processes that our investigation revealed are poorly supported in requirements engineering. The paper ends with a research agenda to incorporate creative processes, techniques, training and tools in requirements projects

Scientists’ sense making when hypothesizing about disease mechanisms from expression data and their needs for visualization support

Abstract A common class of biomedical analysis is to explore expression data from high throughput experiments for the purpose of uncovering functional relationships that can lead to a hypothesis about mechanisms of a disease. We call this analysis expression driven, -omics hypothesizing. In it, scientists use interactive data visualizations and read deeply in the research literature. Little is known, however, about the actual flow of reasoning and behaviors (sense making) that scientists enact in this analysis, end-to-end. Understanding this flow is important because if bioinformatics tools are to be truly useful they must support it. Sense making models of visual analytics in other domains have been developed and used to inform the design of useful and usable tools. We believe they would be helpful in bioinformatics. To characterize the sense making involved in expression-driven, -omics hypothesizing, we conducted an in-depth observational study of one scientist as she engaged in this analysis over six months. From findings, we abstracted a preliminary sense making model. Here we describe its stages and suggest guidelines for developing visualization tools that we derived from this case. A single case cannot be generalized. But we offer our findings, sense making model and case-based tool guidelines as a first step toward increasing interest and further research in the bioinformatics field on scientists’ analytical workflows and their implications for tool design.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109495/1/12859_2012_Article_6377.pd

Metaphor, Objects, and Commodities

This article is a contribution to a symposium that focuses on the ideas of Margaret Jane Radin as a point of departure, and particularly on her analyses of propertization and commodification. While Radin focuses on the harms associated with commodification of the person, relying on Hegel's idea of alienation, we argue that objectification, and in particular objectification of various features of the digital environment, may have important system benefits. We present an extended critique of Radin's analysis, basing the critique in part on Gadamer's argument that meaning and application are interrelated and that meaning changes with application. Central to this interplay is the speculative form of analysis that seeks to fix meaning, contrasted with metaphorical thought that seeks to undermine some fixed meanings and create new meanings through interpretation. The result is that speculative and metaphorical forms are conjoined in an interactive process through which new adaptations emerge. Taking this critique an additional step, we use examples from contemporary intellectual property law discourse to demonstrate how an interactive approach, grounded in metaphor, can yield important insights

PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT OF INNOVATION FIELDS : APPLYING CK DESIGN THEORY IN CROSS INDUSTRY EXPLORATORY PARTNERSHIP

Our paper refers to an industrial practice based on an integrated theoretical framework of design, CK design theory (Hatchuel and Weil, 2002, Hatchuel and Weil, 2003, Hatchuel and Weil, 2008), to support people in management of innovation fields. This study is based on an empirical case in a new form of R&D partnerships, the Cross Industry Exploratory Partnerships. MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory® is composed of a broad scope of partners 2 which aims to co-explore opportunities of micronanotechnologies. The paper deals with a strategic design tool, OPERA, which has been experimented since 2007 and involved participation of design team work and powerholders. During two years, creative insights and projects of the two laboratory's major innovation fields have been collected and structured within CK theory. This tool permits power-holders to drive innovation projects by giving an overview of explored concepts (and still not explored), activation and production of competencies and knowledge.CK theory; innovative design; innovation partnership; OPERA; design theory; management of innovation

Design tribes and information spaces for creative conversations

This paper reports on work in progress to augment the role and practice of Creative Conversations in product design education. We describe changes in practice designed to elevate the importance of conversations and various pedagogical approaches used to support this elevation. These changes are principally manifested in the formation of like-minded Communities of Interest, or ‘Design Tribes’, the adoption of revised design process models and the associated reorganisation of assessment philosophy and practice. We go on to describe and reflect on various technological interventions deployed, that have been designed to weakly augment the conversation space in both situated (studio based contact sessions) and distributed (work undertaken in between contact sessions) settings. Keywords: Design Development, Creative Conversation, Idea Generation, Design Critique, Design Practice

The Assessment Scale for Creative Collaboration (ASCC) Validation and Reliability Study

Creativity, a primary academic objective, is crucial in higher education, as economic, informational, societal and environmental advancements rely on people’s ability to innovate. Creativity is widely investigated in its individualistic form, yet there is a notable dearth in work that studies its collective dimension, from a learning perspective. This study focuses on validating the psychometric properties of an existing instrument (ASCC), by measuring creative collaboration in blended learning settings. Two hundred and thirty-six under and post-graduate students self-evaluated their creative collaboration experiences, using the ASCC instrument. The findings of exploratory factor analysis denote a three-factor (21-item) structure, measuring ‘Synergistic Social Collaboration’, ‘Distributed Creativity’, and ‘Time Regulation and Achievement’, with good internal consistency. An instrument with valid psychometric properties for the assessment of creative collaboration is much-needed in the growing research and practitioners’ community. This is critical in the fields of Design, HCI, and Engineering, which rely extensively on the creative collaboration (online and offline) of teams to develop innovative products that are suitable for real-world purposes

Perceptions of K-12 Teachers on the Cognitive, Affective, and Conative Functionalities of Gifted Students Engaged in Design Thinking

Gifted students are our nation’s natural resource of technological inventors and innovators, but oftentimes do not receive differentiated instruction in technology/engineering design learning environments. This is not negligence or lack of care by the instructor, but a national issue of not sufficiently providing pre- and in-service teachers with formal training opportunities in gifted education. The purpose of this study was to understand the perceptions of K-12 teachers, trained in gifted education pedagogy and the Design Thinking Model (DTM), after their gifted students engaged in design thinking activities. Fifteen K-12 educators of different content areas reflected in focus groups upon how their gifted students performed. Teachers noted cognitive, affective, and conative phenomena, such as development of 21st Century capabilities, externalizations of psychosocial behaviors (e.g., perfectionism, avoidance of failure, gifted underachievement), and strong motivations to solve problems for end-users. The researchers suggest that with the reality of educators unable to receive formal training in gifted education, developing an awareness of intrapersonal functionalities of gifted students engaged in design thinking can be a significant step toward providing supportive learning environments