Design Brainstorming Board- To Aid Early Design Communication

Independent Research, DLC– Spring 2007

Huang, Yingdan Mangalath, Praful

Shao, Peng Michael

Early Phase Design

• Dynamics in complex systems– Deterministic chaos system: one that is bounded

and sensitive to initial conditions– Computationally irreducible[1]

[1] “Complexity science in collaborative design”, Jeffrey Johnson, CoDesign, Inernational Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, Vol. 1 No. 4, Dec. 2005

77 67 60 90 52

88 50 55 53 52

80 86 84 35 30

40 43 82 81 37

78 67 60 90 52

88 50 55 53 52

80 86 84 35 30

40 43 82 81 37

Fig.1: In deterministic systems, small changes in initial conditions can give different outcomes

Brainstorming

• Brainstorming involves both idea generation and idea reduction.

• The most creative, innovative ideas often result from combining multiple, seemingly unrelated ideas.

• Various voting techniques may be used to prioritize the ideas created.[2]

• Live brainstorming vs. Web-based brainstorming[2],[3]

[2] Managing Software Requirements: A Unified Approach, Dean Leffingwell, Don Widrig[3] Brainstorming Groups in Context: Effectiveness in a Product Design Firm, Robert I. Sutton, Andrew Hargadon, Stanford University

Collaborative Design

• Group work == Group creativity?– “big C” & “little c” creativity

• Instinctively, people feel that working in a group has an advantage over working individually on many creative tasks.

• However, research with laboratory groups has consistently shown that on brainstorming tasks, interacting groups actually underperforms groups of non-interacting individuals. [4]

• Despite these findings, we believe that interacting work groups in organizational settings may be able to achieve high quality creative outcomes.

[4] Group Creativity: Innovation Through Collaboration, Edited by Paul B. Paulus and Bernard A. Nijstad

Private Spaces

3-ary relation (triangle)

4-ary relation (tetrahedron)

Public Space

Binary relation >3-ary relation

Exploring DBB Models

• Notions of DBB– Flexible and dynamic meeting time and relationship– Public – Private – Semi Private space – Design is an iterative “Top-down” and “bottom-up”

process– Divergent/Convergent issue

• https://webfiles.colorado.edu/huangy/www/myApplet.html

Current Situation

Images

FileSharing

Conferencing

Multimedia

Web-basedBrainstorming

Idea…Generation?Reduction?

Example 1: Thinkature

•Single online workspace.•Text chat, voice chat, uploads, sketches.•Associations (aka. relations).

Example 2: Skrbl

•Private and Public workspaces.•Notes, sketches, sharing images and files.

Example 3: GroupScribbles

•Simultaneous Private and Public workspaces.

•Flexible backgrounds, representations.

Example 4: Vyew

•Conferences, streaming.•Documents for review.•Multiple sessions.•Versioning.

Example n…….

Things really haven’t evolved beyond the whiteboard!

Pretty and flash and all that web 2.0 Jazz but …

• Can they really aid in early design communication?

• Wiki Driven Brainstorming- simple - enhanced wiki and issue tracking systems alreadu

used for software development projects (trac) - what features can we add to supplement idea-

generation and reduction?– Mindmapping – freemind, http://freemind.sourceforge.net/– Synchronous editing + whiteboard - something simple and

clean ,http://jsolait.net/wiki/examples/jsonrpc/canvas