Concept Refinement 7/6/16

Week 2: Concept Refinement

In week 2, we further narrowed down our ideation to one concept. We revisited the problem space and decided that the core value of our solution is to "help form common ground between designers and project owners." Based on this value and our previous investigation, we created a concept image, storyboard, interaction model, and system diagram to help us convey the idea.

Refined Project Focus

Facilitate client contribution in early stages of the spatial design process to help the formation of common ground between designers and project owners.

Background

Sharing common ground (i.e. mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions) is essential for communication between collaborators (Clark, H.H. & Brennan, S. E., 1991). However, architects and project owners working in a remote context face two major challenges.

First, it can be difficult for collaborators without spatial design backgrounds to fully understand design intentions. Differences of expertise in project owners make it easy to misunderstand 2D artifacts such as floor plans and images, or how the final design might look after being built. This kind of miscommunication can be extremely costly in the long run.

The second challenge is ensuring that people are referring to the same objects or locations during discussions. With gesture and gaze, referential communication diminishes the effort needed for mutual understanding during face-to-face communication. However, in a remote context, people might not be able to rely on these non-verbal cues to establish common ground. Remote collaborators need to spend more effort to get on the same page, resulting in inefficiency and possible misunderstanding.

Concept Overview

A model-based interface shared between remote collaborators that facilitates dialog and spatial understanding through the establishment of common ground. Stakeholders share the same virtual environment and experience asymmetrical viewpoints to gain a full sense of scale while allowing real-time manipulation of the model. 

Target User

Project owners and investors 

Architects and interior designers

Problem Space

Most project owners or investors have a difficult time understanding space and sense of scale from 2D images of design concepts such as floor plans. On the other hand, it is also difficult for designers to fully capture client needs and expectations by referring solely on text-based markup without more in-depth social cues. The communication of design feedback through traditional channels such as email also causes considerable delays to the project schedule.

Value

Remote collaborators can establish common ground by breaking technical barriers and utilizing referential communication. The solution facilitates the design process by presenting a modular experience with tools to help visualize non-verbal cues.

Interaction Model

The model/space itself stands as the common interface for both designers and project owners. Designers manipulate the model in the small scale while project owners experience the updated changes in the full scale. Designers can understand project owners’ attention and needs by sharing their gaze, reading their gesture and listening to their voice.

System Diagram

The system diagram maps out the stakeholders involved in the design process and their relationship with other components in the system. Steps 1 to 7 indicate the general design process and show how the solution is integrated into the system.

Reflection

Overall, we feel confident about our design direction and will push forward with prototyping the concept.  After spending a long time debating as a group on whether to present several concept variations or just a single concept, we found that the single concept stood better on its own than several incomplete variations.  Instructor and peer feedback brought up the issue of asynchronous vs. synchronous collaboration and how our solution might continue to function in the project workflow.  As we begin prototyping, we plan to pick a smaller function of the interaction to build in order to evaluate it.