PSPD - The Video

Overview

The Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community has long been concerned with the design of usable software applications and computer systems.  Techniques such as Participatory Design (PD) and User Centered Design (UCD) have been developed over the years to bring about this envisionment of greater usability.   PD and UCD epitomize the collaborative nature of design, bringing together stakeholders from diverse backgrounds to work together in both the analytical and creative practices of systems development.

Our previous research has shown that creativity is an important feature of design and how we may develop techniques to support creativity in collaborative activities such as design.  Within the CSCW community, many researchers have developed design environments to support the design process.  However, such environments typically have been developed on the basis of practical knowledge and experience with little underlying theory.

With a few exceptions such as Ben Shneiderman and Gerhard Fischer, little research has been performed looking at creativity from the perspective of such design environments.  Ben Shneiderman takes a theoretical perspective on the design of such creativity support environments, basing his reasoning on the development of his Genex framework, which have evolved from previous Codex and Memex frameworks.  However, the Genex framework is focused on ad hoc remote collaboration – an individual working on his/her own and distributing knowledge via resources such as the web – which does not capture the essence of the collaborative nature of face-to-face interaction in design.  Gerhard Fischer is one of the few researchers who has developed a design environment focusing on creativity and its support – the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC).  Gerhard Fischer views creativity as the product of a symmetry of ignorance, quoting Snow’s  claim that ‘the clashing point of two subjects, two disciples, two cultures ought to produce creative chaos’.  Such a view of creativity, however, lacks explanation as how and why such ‘creative chaos’ comes about, therefore failing to provide support or the lower level processes fundamental to creativity.  In our research we have developed a deeper understanding of creativity based on an abundance of literature from the psychological community who have investigated creativity over the last century and applied this knowledge to the domain of design.

Public Social Private Design (PSPD) is a new creativity support tool/design environment for the domain of concept design. Unlike many creativity support tool/design environments which come about through a developers personal experience, PSPD has been based upon numerous studies (i.e. diary studies, ethnographic studies, experimental design, evaluative studies and theoretical reasoning). PSPD is designed to support idea generation through the process of sketching with annotation - concept designs. However, PSPD goes beyond previous developments supporting the collaborative activities of design on an individual, sub-group and group level - dynamic features of the collaborative creative process. Within many collaborative creative activities, members of groups (i.e. design teams) will work individually, as a sub-group or as a complete group. PSPD supports the dynamic nature of group creativity through the use of different interaction spaces inherent in different technologies - a tabletop (public), a tablet PC (social) and a PDA (private). PSPD extends previous creativity support tools/design environments providing users with technological support as they need it, whatever stage of the creative process.

PSPD iteration 1 is complete. Iteration 2 is now underway. This iteration is looking to improve upon the software for the individual technologies and the networking between them.