Making Sense of Communication Associated with Artifacts during Early Design Activity

Part 2: Long and Short PapersInternational audienceCommunication associated with artifacts serves a critical role in the creation, refinement, and selection of conceptual ideas. Despite the close relationship between ideas and surrounding communication, effective integration ofthese two types of design materials are not well-supported by exiting design tools - resulting in ad-hoc and ineffective strategies for managing communication during the design process. In this paper, we report the results of a contextual inquiry (N=15) aimed at understanding communication practices, its role in the design process, and strategies utilized by designers to manage and utilize communication outcomes in relation to artifacts. Our findings show thatmore than 50% of early design activity consists of three categories of communication (information seeking, brainstorming, and feedback) and communication practice varies as a function of expertise, organizational and social factors. Additionally, novice and freelance designers exhibit greater reliance on online forums to find suitable communication partners to generate and refine ideas whereas experts communicate with other experts or team members for information collection and sharing

Multimedia Mining of Collaborative Virtual Workspaces: An Integrative Framework for Extracting and Integrating Collaborative Process Knowledge

Collaborative virtual environments are becoming an intrinsic part of professional practices. In addition to providing collaboration support, they have the potential to collect vast amounts of multimedia data about the actions and content of such collaborative activities. The aim of this research is to utilize this data effectively, extract meaningful insights out of it and feed discovered knowledge back into the environment. The paper presents a framework for integrating multimedia data mining techniques with collaborative virtual environments, starting from early conceptual development. Discovered patterns are deposited in an organisational memory, which makes these available within the virtual environment. Some of the ideas are illustrated by an example from the application to collaborative spaces developed in LiveNet, a virtual workspace design system