Understanding knowledge management practices for early design activity and its implications for reuse

Making Sense of Communication Associated with Artifacts during Early Design Activity

“…They engage in communication about the artifacts and utilize the outcomes of communication to guide the design process.Designers leverage artifacts and associated communication to capture the underlyingdesignprocess and believe that artifacts or communication alone fails to adequately represent their process. As a result, designers want to capture artifacts and relatedcommunication together as it facilitates reuse, in line with findings reported in [19]. Existing technology do not support capturing and management of artifacts and communication in one space, resulting in disassociation between these two design components.…”

“…The interview had 19 questions guided by our prior research on reuseof existing design knowledge during the early stages of creative design domains [19]. Table 2 lists sample questions asked during the interview.We began the interview by asking the designer to briefly describe a recent or ongoingproject and encouraged her to share stories about communication practices during their ideation process to ground the discussion.…”

“…Bonnardel studied the influence of information availability on the idea generation process [4]. Researchers also studied the impact of capturing, accessing, and reusing artifacts in the ideation process [19]. A separate thread of research centered on the creation andutilization of sketches and early prototypes to externalize ideas [7,20].…”

“…rationale), but ignore the relationship between artifacts and other types of communication (e.g., discussions, feedback, and client preferences) that shapes the ideation process. The resulting systems thus fail to represent the design process, making it difficult for designers to utilize and understand the process in which the artifacts were created [19]. We believe research aimed at understanding designers' communication practice in relation to artifactscan provide valued insight and guide the design of tools that would provide more effective management of the design process.…”

“…[P4] Designers also try to capture communication outcomes to select the best idea from a number of possible candidates. To some designers selecting the best direction is often as challenging as coming up with numerous ideas [19]. Designers tend to capture early ideas and associated feedback on post-its and use these to analyze alternate directions.…”