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Sharing Design Knowledge: A Statement for CSCL Pre-conferenceMy interest in wikis owes to my interest in sharing design knowledge. I have used wikis, primarily in my classes as a means of Eli Blevis My interest in wikis owes to my interest in sharing design knowledge. I have used wikis, primarily in my classes as a means of trying to create shared design knowledge and a studio-based learning community. I work in the arena of design-oriented HCI. The notion of formalizing and codifying design knowledge is best represented in HCI by the design rationale, which has been summarized in an anthology by Moran & Carroll (1996). In design and HCI alike, pattern languages (Alexander, 1977) figure prominently as notions of encoded design knowledge - less formal than design rationale, but still highly structured. I myself designed and implemented several computer applications aimed at providing a means for working with logical representations of design knowledge. I have used my own applications to create real world specifications in my professional practice as well as in my pedagogy. The problem with formalized constructions of shared design knowledge is that the formalism is oftentimes a barrier to sharing, since many people involved in design - even the design of interactive systems - have limited exposure to the discrete mathematical concepts that would enable them to feel comfortable with such rigour. Thus, I have mostly abandonned such formal approaches and come to focus my efforts on collaborative systems for sharing design knowledge, rather than structured representantions and reasoning. I have made several contributions along these lines, including (i.) several iterations of the design eXchange - a system for shared collaborative construction of design knowledge which uses wikis in its last two iterations (Blevis et al., 2005A; 2005B) (ii.) collaborative profiles - a notion developed with colleagues Erik Stolterman and Youn-kyung Lim of how design teams can better collaborate by making explicit their tacit understandings of values, methods, and reasoning, as well as mind sets, knowledge sets, skill sets, and tool sets (Blevis et al., 2006), and (iii.) interactions with others about how to bring design studio culture to HCI (Blevis et al., 2007). All of these projects are ongoing concerns. Several other studies have been conducted which are described in some of the papers listed above. What I mean by a studio-based learning community as a vision for an activity which I have tried to augment by the use of wikis, I can sum up by quoting from a workshop abstract I did with several others for the 2007 CHI conference:
In the general case, a design studio is creative, collaborative, and most-of-all highly material---that is the space is dominated by material objects, surfaces for sharing ideas and inspiration, making ideas and activities visible and tangible by means of physical materials such as post-it notes, sketches, magazine scraps, models, and physical prototypes. The physical arrangement of a design studio creates shared spaces and personal spaces. There are oftentimes walls and other less permanent vertical surfaces that are highly decorated with various images, diagrams, sketches, and objects related to design work-in-progress. The persistence of what is represented on such surfaces is important to the design process and serves as collective memory and external cognition for the design teams. The rich environment of the design studio stimulates creativity in a manner germane to the design tasks at hand. Many of the objects in a design studio may have seemingly little to do with the projects at hand, but in fact serve to challenge and inspire new ideas, to create cross-contextual remindings that lead to breakthrough thinking and conceptualization. Setting up a workspace as a design studio with work-in-progress in clear view invites critique and fosters the deeply entrenched designerly practice of showing work and eliciting feedback early and often. Such practice encourages discourse and reflection during the design process. Much of design work is collaborative and group-oriented and the physical nature of design studios affords such group-orientation and collaborations. There is a beehive effect in a fully functional design studio in which the energy of others serves as a stimulus to each individual and between groups. The physical environment encourages and emphasizes sharing and collaborative interaction more than individual work in front of individual personal computers. References [1] Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., & Silverstein, M. (1977). A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York. Oxford University Press. [2] Blevis, E., Lim, Y.K., Stolterman, E., Vetting-Wolf, T., and Sato, K. (2007). Supporting design studio culture in HCI. In CHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, CA, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 2821-2824. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240866.1241086 [3] Blevis, E., Lim, Y.K., & Stolterman, E. (2006). Regarding Software as a Material of Design. Wonderground 2006 Lisbon, Portugal. Design Research Society. (20 pages). Download PDF [4] Blevis, E., Lim, Y. K., Ozakca, M., & Aneja, S. (2005A). Designing Interactivity for the Specific Context of Designerly Collaborations. ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, Portland, OR. (4 pages) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1056808.1056880 [5] Blevis, E., Lim, Y. K., & Ozakca, M. (2005B). The Design Exchange: A Collaborative Online Community for Designers based on Shared Construction of Design Knowledge. 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Online Communities and Social Computing, Las Vegas, NV (10 pages) [6] Moran, T. P., & Carroll, J. M. (Eds.). (1996). Design Rationale: Concepts, Techniques, and Use. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. |
Sharing Design Knowledge
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