Supporting collaborative design with representations for mutual understanding

Jonathan Ostwald
1995 Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '95  
This paper describes a research effort to investigate cross-cultural collaboration in software development. The work is based on a model of collaborative design that calls for stakeholders (including developers and end-users) to iteratively construct an understanding of design problems and potential solutions through the construction and refinement of design representations. The Evolving Artifact (EVA) software design environment has been implemented to support this process. EVA has been used
more » ... a development project in a regional telephone company. A case study of this project will be analyzed to yield guidelines and design principles for constructing collaborative design, workplace cultures, work-oriented design, software development, EVA, functional objects, prototyping My research views development of work-oriented [3] software as a collaborative design task between software developers and clients (i.e., end-users). Developers and end-users belong to different workplace cultures [2], each of which depend on shared representations, norms, rules, and languages. While shared conventions of meaning permit a conceptual coordination within a given culture, they also form boundaries that can hamper communication across different cultures. The essential challenges for cross-cultural collaborative software development are to transcend the respective cultural boundaries and to achieve a growing understanding. The two main questions addressed by my research are: 1) What kind of design representations can support cross-cultural collaborative design of work-oriented systems? 2) How can a growing understanding be represented in a software artifact? Abstract representations for mutual understanding. Techniques and methods for large-scale, contract-based software development are not oriented toward user involvement [4] , and therefore are not appropriate to support the design of highly interactive, workoriented systems. These approaches assume that analysts or other user representatives can produce requirements documents that precisely and completely reflect the needs of end-users. However, this is an unreasonable assumption because end-users do not always know their needs, and because their task knowledge is often tacit [8] . Furthermore, end-users are not always aware of the available technological options [5] . The action-reflection-critique model [6] is proposed as a model for collaborative design. The model synthesizes design theory with theories about how people collaborate to solve problems. Design theory suggests that designers solve problems incrementally by creating explicit design representations which "talk back" to the designer [9], revealing new understandings of the problem. Human-human collaborative problem solving theory suggests that people construct and maintain an understanding through dialog, in which meanings are accrued incrementally, along with evidence of what has been understood so far. The action-reflection-critique model calls for stakeholders to incrementally develop an understanding of design problems and potential solutions through construction of external design representations that ground communication of design intent and design critiques. Mutual understanding is constructed through creation, discussion and modification of design representations. Communication of design ideas through external design representations is difficult when the communication partners come from different workplace cultures. Bødker and Pedersen [2] describeworkplace cultures as systems of meanings "hidden behind or in the various artifacts, symbols, work routines, and established patterns of cooperation." Importantly, meanings are not an intrinsic property of artifacts and symbols. Instead, they are ascribed by the people who share the culture. Design representations must therefore be meaningful across cultural boundaries to talk back to all stakeholders and to foster a growing understanding of the design issues. RELATED APPROACHES Participatory design approaches aim to increase usability of systems through collaboration between developers and end-users [1] . My work shares this goal. In particular, I focus on to ground collaboration with computationaldesign representations, to drive an evolutionary design process with the communication that takes place around the representations, and to capture the communication in an evolving artifact along with the representations themselves. tool support MODELING COLLABORATIVE DESIGN REPRESENTATIONS FOR MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING System documentation is often not meaningful to end-users because it is abstract and tends to be written in the developer's language. Prototypes, on the other hand, can be meaningful across cultural boundaries because they are concrete design representations that are interpretable by both developers and end-users. When prototypes and documentation are combined, the context for understanding each is increased. Prototypes clarify and instantiate documentation, while documentation provides context for interpreting prototypes.
doi:10.1145/223355.223433 dblp:conf/chi/Ostwald95 fatcat:i4fah4svrnfhbeltemhrs3hory