Workspaces and Cooperation Notions in the Design Process

Abstract

Understand the way the actors organize their activities is needed for better managing the resources used in distance collaborative design. We introduce here the notion of design workspaces and distinguish them according to the number of actors (individual versus collective) and the type of activity (communication versus cooperation, related to the presence or absence of Intermediary Objects - IO - on these spaces). A method for analysing a design meeting in order to delimit and then qualify design phases is presented. A specific device was used to delimit the different workspaces. Audio and video records allow for a precise observation of glances, gestures, and exchanged words. From these observations, we coded: actions on the IO (we distinguish draw, point, annotate, and handle), attentions from the glances (to another actor, or to an IO, noting its workspace), and design acts which are requests and propositions of information, solution, criteria definition and evaluation. Several graphs representing the different data versus time are proposed and used for identifying and qualifying phases. Analyzing a short (1 hour) experiment with 4 designers gave two main results. First, a significant modification of the designers’ attention is revealed to be a good indicator for phase shift detection, especially when an IO appears in the collective space thus six phases were identified. Second, the type of actions and design acts used for each phase show important differences between the three main phases that were analyzed. These results are promising and show relevant indicators for segmenting, and qualifying design phases. Repeating such analyses should lead to activity models onto which new design tools could be proposed.