Published: 2008-02-15
ISBN:
ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)
Effective communication is an important factor to the success of collaborative design. Individual thought can be shared in a brainstorming manner and result in design-thought inspiring. Although communication covers from social psychology; information theory; linguistics; drawing and gesturing etc. most scholars agree that design by face-to-face (closely coupled) mode is superior to media-involved (loosely coupled) one.(Jeff WT Kan; John S Gero; 2005a)
As team design activity becomes primary source for idea generation. Problems of how to record the transitional process of collaborative work and evaluate the effectiveness of outcome become imperative issues. Goldschmid (Goldschmidt; 1990) proposed to use Linkography to assess the design productivity. In her method; designers’ protocol which is derived either via video data; interview or discussions is represented by a set of moves and links between moves. A link connected two moves if they are associated whereas a node indicates the unconnected relation between any two moves. The design process can then be graphically seen as a combination of sequentially listed moves and links among them. Figure 1 shows terms used in Linkography. Conceptually; her idea provided a mechanism for tracing abstract design procedures which are basically the collection of participants’ inter-opinions.
Linkography; entropy; collaborative design; creativity; pattern-matching algorithm
