Peepdeck: a dashboard for the distributed design studio

Abstract

Abstract-Designers adopt a large amount of generalpurpose tools for supporting their remote collaborative tasks. Each tool provides very diverse functionalities: from file sharing to instant communication and video collaboration. The designer struggles when filtering and combining the right information spread across the multitude of tools. This research extends McGrath's framework of task circumflex to map the collaborative demands of the design practitioner and proposes Peepdeck, a design exploration to support them. Peepdeck is a dashboard that assembles information scattered across multiple tools in a personalized and organized way. Through two design iterations followed by evaluations of the user interface, several requirements were identified for supporting collaboration awareness in design teams. Insights confirmed the relevance of combining information from different but already familiar tools, rather than attempting to replace them. It was identified the importance of optimizing for visual scanning, supporting search of content and allowing users to customize the tool.

Speculative Data Work & Dashboards

“…A dashboard can be said to both help coordinate work [17,81], improve awareness [33], and to a lesser extent, facilitate knowledge management [1]. Attention to dashboards within CSCW has fallen along these lines, seeing researchers study and develop dashboards to support team activity awareness [11,45,90], facilitate idea management processes [5], explore and improve shared cognition and performance in teams [2,34] and coordinate work in design studios [64]. The focus within CSCW research has been to understand how dashboards support particular goals, such as productivity or awareness in programming, or explore more diverse topics, such as "workplace learning processes" [75] or college student mental health [98].…”

Alice

“…We mapped the previous problems with the work from [8] to derive three main challenges for awareness in design collaboration: 1) to display the most relevant information to the designer team (Consequential communication); 2) to bring the material nature of design to online communication (Explicit communication); and 3) to track the changes and evolution of the process (Feedthrough). To approach these challenges, designers require additional awareness mechanisms that support ad hoc collaboration activities [6,10].…”

“…Nevertheless, these tools appear to be cumbersome in handling large projects and the task and file management needs of group, who improvise and develop informal and suboptimal practices [11]. This results in designers adopting a large amount of generic tools to cover the collaboration needs of specific design tasks [11,10]. Ultimately, this makes it difficult to keep awareness and a coherent overview of design inputs, to follow the progress of the project, and to trace over time and to integrate the contributions of different partners.…”