Complex design problems require more knowledge than any single person possesses because the knowledge relevant to a problem is usually distributed among stakeholders. Bringing different and often controversial points of view together to create a shared understanding among these stakeholders can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. New media that allow owners of problems to contribute to framing and resolving complex design problems can extend the power of the individual human mind. Based on our past work and study of other approaches, systems, and collaborative and participatory processes, this article identifies challenges we see as the limiting factors for future collaborative human-computer systems. The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) is introduced as an integrated physical and computational environment addressing some of these challenges. The vision behind the EDC shifts future development away from the computer as the focal point, toward an emphasis that tries to improve our understanding of the human, social, and cultural system that creates the context for use. This work is based on new conceptual principles that include creating shared understanding among various stakeholders, contextualizing information to the task at hand, and creating objects to think with in collaborative design activities.

Interfaces for conceptual and creative design should recognize and interpret drawings. They should also capture users ’ intended ambiguity, vagueness, and imprecision and convey these qualities visually and through interactive behavior. Freehand drawing can provide this information and it is a natural input mode for design. We describe a pen-based interface that acquires information about ambiguity and precision from freehand input, represents it internally, and echoes it to users visually and through constraint based edit behavior.

The article presents a conceptual framework and a coherent method for design in an organizational context within the participatory design tradition. The MUST method has been developed throughout 10 projects in Danish and American organizations, and it has recently been evaluated and adopted by 3 Danish organizations. The method is based on thorough participation with users and managers, and it combines the use of ethnographic techniques and intervention. The article describes the application area and perspective of the method, presents 6 general principles on which the method is based, and describes 5 main activities providing a stepwise decision-making process in the overall design process. Each of the main activities are illustrated by an example taken from our last project. The article concludes by summing up the

We argue that HCI has emerged as a design-oriented field of research, directed at large towards innovation, design, and construction of new kinds of information and interaction technology. But the understanding of such an attitude to research in terms of philosophical, theoretical, and methodological underpinnings seems however relatively poor within the field. This paper intends to specifically address what design `is' and how it is related to HCI. First, three candidate accounts from design theory of what design `is' are introduced; the conservative, the romantic, and the pragmatic. By examining the role of sketching in design, it is found that the designer becomes involved in a necessary dialogue, from which the design problem and its solution are worked out simultaneously as a closely coupled pair. In conclusion, it is proposed that we need to acknowledge, first, the role of design in HCI conduct, and second, the difference between the knowledge-generating Design-oriented Research and the artifact-generating conduct of Research-oriented Design.

This work analyzes the central role of interpretation in non-routine design. Based on this analysis, a theory of computer support for interpretation in cooperative design is constructed. The theory is grounded in studies of design and interpretation. It is illustrated by mechanisms provided by a software substrate for computer-based design environments, applied to a sample task of lunar habitat design. Computer support of

There has been an increasing interest in objects within the HCI field particularly with a view to designing tangible interfaces. However, little is known about how people make sense of objects and how objects support thinking. This paper presents a study of groups of engineers using physical objects to prototype designs, and articulates the roles that physical objects play in supporting their design thinking and communications. The study finds that design thinking is heavily dependent upon physical objects, that designers are active and opportunistic in seeking out physical props and that the interpretation and use of an object depends heavily on the activity. The paper discusses the trade-offs that designers make between speed and accuracy of models, and specificity and generality in choice of representations. Implications for design of tangible interfaces are discussed.

The paper discusses the use of freehand diagrams in architectural design. It examines the roles of diagrams in various contexts: pedagogical books, design studies, designers ’ introspective accounts and empirical studies of drawing in design. It offers several examples of thinking with diagrams in design and concludes with a discussion of the requirements for computational support for the diagrams in design thinking.

This article presents a cognitively oriented viewpoint on design. It focuses on cognitive, dynamic aspects of real design, i.e., the actual cognitive activity implemented by designers during their work on professional design projects. Rather than conceiving designing as problem solving—Simon’s symbolic information processing (SIP) ap-proach—or as a reflective practice or some other form of situated activity—the situativity (SIT) approach—we consider that, from a cognitive viewpoint, designing is most appropriately characterised as a construction of representations. After a critical discussion of the SIP and SIT approaches to design, we present our viewpoint. This presentation concerns the evolving nature of representations regarding levels of abstraction and degrees of precision, the function of external representations, and specific qualities of representation in collective design. Designing is described at three levels: the organisation of the activity, its strategies, and its design-representation construction activities (different ways to generate, transform, and evaluate representations). Even if we adopt a “generic design ” stance, we claim that design can take different forms depending on the nature of the artefact, and we propose some candidates for dimensions that allow a distinction to be made between these forms of design. We discuss the potential specificity of HCI design, and the lack

Abstract People perceive patterns in representations, patterns that may not have been initially intended. This phenomenon of emergence is deemed to play an important role in design. Computer based design assistants can and should support this human perceptual ability, using pattern recognition to anticipate human designers ’ perception of emergent shapes and supporting the subsequent manipulation of and reasoning with these shapes as part of the design. Freehand drawing programs with gesture recognition are well positioned to implement shape emergence. Support for emergent shapes in the Back of an Envelope system is described. 1. Emergence in Visual Representations and Design Textbook examples of visually ambiguous figures such as the “two faces or a vase, ” “young or old woman”, or the Necker cube (Solso 1994) remind us that visual representations need not dictate a single reading. Yet these figures are more than curiosities: They illustrate a powerful visual-cognitive effect that artists and designers take advantage of in everyday work. Multiple

This paper attempts to establish a systems-semiotic framework explaining creativity in the design process, where the design process is considered to have as its basis the cognitive process. The design process is considered as the interaction between two or more cognitive systems resulting in a purposeful and ongoing transformation of their already complex representational structures and the production of newer ones, in order to fulfill an ill-defined goal. Creativity is considered as the result of an emergence of organizational complexity in each cognitive system participating in the design process, while it is trying to purposefully incorporate new constraints in its meaning structures. The meanings generated in each system are identified as the contingent and anticipatory content of its representations, and where selforganization is the dominant process in which they are continuously involved. Furthermore, Peircean semiotic processes appear to provide the functionality needed by the emergent representational structures in order to complete the cycle of a creative design process. Creativity originates in the abductive stage of the semiotic process, the fallible nature of which is maintained in the proposed framework by the fact that the respective emergent representations can be misfits. The nodal points of the framework are identified and analyzed showing that a cognitive system needs the whole interactive anticipatory cycle in order to engage in a creative design process.