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Inhabiting the information space : Paradigms of collaborative design environments

University of British Columbia

The notion of information space (iSpace) is that a collective context of transmitters and receivers can serve as a medium to share, exchange, and apply data and knowledge between a group of human beings or software agents. Inhabiting this space requires a perception of its dimensions, limits, and an understanding of the way data is diffused between inhabitants. One of the important aspects of iSpace is that it expands the limits of communication between distributed designers allowing them to carry out tasks that were very difficult to accomplish with the diverse, but not well integrated current communication technologies. In architecture, design team members, often rely on each others' expertise to review and problem solve design issues as well as interact with each other for critic, and presentations. This process is called Collaborative Design. Applying this process of collaboration to the iSpace to serve as a supplementary medium of communication, rather than a replacement for it, and understanding how design team members can use it to enhance the effectiveness of the design process and increase the efficiency of communication, is the main focus of this research. The first chapter will give an overview of the research and define the objectives and the scope of it as well as giving a background on the evolving technological media in design practice. This chapter will also give a summary of some case studies for collaborative design projects as real examples to introduce the subject. The second chapter of this research will study the collaborative design activities with respect to the creative problem solving, the group behaviour, and the information flow between members. It will also examine the technical and social problems with the distributed collaboration. The third chapter will give a definition of the iSpace and analyze its components (epistemological, utilitarian, and cultural) based on research done by others. It will also study the impact of the iSpace on the design process in general and on the architectural product in particular. The fourth chapter will be describing software programs written as prototypes for this research that allow for realtime and non-realtime collaboration over the internet, tailored specifically to suit the design team use to facilitate distributed collaboration in architecture. These prototypes are : 1. pinUpBoard (realtime shared display board for pin-ups) 2. sketchBoard (realtime whiteboarding application with multisessions) 3. mediaBase (shared database management system) 4. teamCalendar (shared interactive calendar on the internet) 5. talkSpace (organized forums for discussions)

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-06-29

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/9808

Architecture

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace