Roles of media affordance for design collaboration

Abstract

Media used in design collaboration have a significant influence on the collaborative design process and outcome. Media afford a certain form of collaboration behavior or interaction among designers, and this affects the content, process, and outcome of design collaboration. For this reason, exploit-ing appropriate media is essential for effective design collaboration. Moreover, as the demand for real-time collaboration by a distributed design team increases, it becomes more important to under-stand the influences of media on design collaboration. However, in spite of its importance, little re-search has been performed on the different influences of media on the specific context of design. In addition, the properties of media that cause the distinguished effects on design collaboration have not been identified. The aim of this research is to discover the meanings and roles of media and their affordances in re-lation to design collaboration. To do so, a critical review of the literature and three analyses of de-sign collaboration affected by distinct media have been conducted. With reviewing previous and related works of collaborative design problem-solving and media for collaboration, online docu-ment tools and face-to-face interaction have been selected as appropriate yet distinct media for de-sign collaboration. By comparing these two media in the design experiment, it was revealed that online document tools are useful for divergent thinking processes, such as generating ideas, while face-to-face interaction is proper for convergent thinking processes, such as making decisions. Furthermore, the collaborative behaviors and phenomena in the design process were collected and analyzed based on the framework of media affordance to identify the influential properties of media for design collaboration. Consequently, four media affordances of online document tools―simultaneity, shareability, visualizability, and recordability―and three media affordances of face-to-face interaction―visibility, audibility, and drawing-ability―for design collaboration were identified. To closely investigate the use of these media affordances with their containing media in the collaborative design process, a design observational study with a professional design team was per-formed in the four different collaboration setups. As a result, the utilization patterns of media and the characteristics of design collaboration affected by the utilization patterns of media are illustrated. Also, the five design activities―information seeking, ideation, concept development, design elaboration, and reviewing―were analyzed with the use of media affordances, and the different forms of design activities were discovered. Based on the findings of this set of studies, a media framework that defines the types of design collaboration is developed, and regarding the implications of media affordances, tactics for design activities are proposed using media affordances with intentions. The contributions of this research can be summarized as follows. First of all, design is viewed as an afforded collaborative process through the studies of the influences of media on design collaboration. This viewpoint differs from the existing perspectives in which design is viewed as a leading activity of designers. To inform this perspective with more specific knowledge, eight media affordances are identified and analyzed in the actual design process. By doing so, different types of design collaboration and diverse forms of design activities are discovered, which can help design researchers and practitioners understand design collaboration based on the use of media and affordances. In addition, as a solution to the problem of distributed design collaboration, the specific ways of conducting design collaboration in a distributed environment are proposed. All of these findings, discussions, and suggestions are expected to add to an understanding of design collaboration in terms of the utilization of media and their affordances.