Remembering Design

Candidate: David Botta
Type: Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D), School of Interactive Arts and Technology
Date: December 11, 2009
Senior Supervisor: Rob Woodbury
Thesis: Download Thesis Document

Abstract

 The increasing availability of web based collaboration tools fuels design conversation between heterogeneous stakeholders across organizational boundaries, underscoring the need for new designers to get to the heart of conversations that might include huge numbers of entries. The goal of this work is to show that linkography is a viable candidate to help make that kind of discovery possible. A linkograph is a model of a design conversation that links design moves with prior, influential moves. This work used qualitative, empirical methods. From analysis of two design meetings, a model was derived to (1) use a linkograph to segment its design discourse on topic shifts, and (2), based on the topic shifts and the linkograph, retrieve relevant contextualizing information from prior conversation. The model was tested by comparing retrieved information for relevance against rich description of a further nine design meetings. The retrieved information was comprehensive, had few incidents of irrelevance, redundant items could be easily screened out, it was easy to abbreviate and paraphrase, and it could be used to explore the conversation. The overall process suggests that collective intelligence could perform linkograph construction. In conclusion, linkography can aid design rationale, during a stage of incremental formalization. This work was exploratory, and further research is recommended.

Keywords: Design history; Design intent; Design rationale capture; Knowledge management.
Subject Terms: System design; Human-computer interaction