"project i/o" - A collaboration tool to facilitate virtual design teams' shared understanding

"project i/o" - A collaboration tool to facilitate virtual design teams' shared understanding

Peskens, T.R.

Pasman, G.J. (mentor)
Horvath, I. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Computer Aided Design Engineering

Master of Science Design for Interaction

2010-01-27

The initiative for this graduation project came from the author. He had the idea that through easier information sharing team collaboration could be improved. After initial exploration the graduation assignment was defined as: “Design a tool that improves the effectiveness of virtual design teams through facilitation of creating shared understanding”. The project was executed at the TU Delft with a design through research approach. Throughout the project, users have received our primary focus — this is expressed by the three rounds of interviews with potential users. The project was setup in three general stages: In the first stage the context was analyzed through a literature review on the topics of collaborative design, the high performance of radically colocated design teams and current tools and technologies, and a number of interviews with designers involved in virtual team work. Then, a preliminary concept was developed, and explored in in-depth interviews with target users. These interviews were supported by the concept which was presented as a storyboard. And finally, an improved concept was developed using the results and insights from the first concept exploration. This improved concept has been materialized in a interactive prototype which formed the basis for a last round of interviews with potential users. The resulting product-concept “project i/o” is a tool which allows team members participating in a project to share, and to acquire knowledge. Team members can share their status of what they are working on and the artifacts they produce — the external representations of their knowledge — with others. In return they receive awareness of what others are working on and awareness of their availability.

CSCW
collaborative design
design research
storyboard testing

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:bea8605c-a78a-4b9b-9bf1-7a3fcd07542a

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2010 Peskens, T.R.