(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1998)
Eastman, Charles M.; Hsi, Idris; Potts, Colin
We are interested in the coordination of design and planning decisions in large, multi-organizational projects and their implications for technology support. These projects are undertaken by goal-driven "virtual organizations", involving companies of different sizes, professional traditions, cultures, as well as geographic location. We have observed several months of planning and review meetings in a multi-national architectural project and have gathered volumes of design and planning documentation in the form of memoranda, faxes, project plans and design drawings. From our observations, we outline the requirements and possible features of useful coordination support.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1995)
Hsi, Idris; Potts, Colin
Interactive systems design based on rationalistic methods can benefit from the integration of ecological methods that gather information about the user and the task environment. In this paper, we begin to discuss how such an integration of methods can be brought about and what benefits can be derived from it. Using meeting scheduling as an example, we show how workplace data gathering, in the form of user interviews, can significantly alter the specification of a collaborative interactive system. Our discussion of rationalistic methods is restricted to goal refinement approaches, and we discuss a series of design issues that are most pertinent in this approach, specifically: agency and responsibility, obstacle identification, obstacle avoidance and recovery, volume, frequency and repetitiveness issues, generic scenarios and critical incidents, artifact analysis, and deliberate fuzziness. However, we conclude by outlining how ecological methods could be integrated similarly with other rationalistic methods.