DesignWebs: Towards the Creation of an
Interactive Navigational Tool to assist and
support Engineering Design Learning
Sharad Oberoi and Susan Finger
Carnegie Mellon University
Collaborative learning in design
• Goal
– Develop tools that encourage process
competence, constructive skills, and reflective
practice
• DesignWebs: Construct product structures
underlying a design artifact from documents
and discussion transcripts in real-time using
machine learning approaches and language
technologies
Collaborative learning in design
• Assertions
– Most learning in design classes takes place in
team meetings and in individual activities
undertaken to help meet team goals
– Argumentation, co-construction, and reflection
are important elements of collaborative learning
Outline
• Setting
– Engineering design capstone course
– Ongoing project to understand collaborative
learning by student design teams
Collaborative learning in design
• Observations for design teams
– Knowledge generated during the design process
frequently goes uncaptured, and when captured,
it is usually poorly organized and buried in
obscure documents
– The design and development process requires
that collaborators build and retain knowledge
through discussions, creating documents and
sharing artifacts
– Effective capture of both semantic knowledge
and episodic knowledge can have many benefits
for both student and professional design teams
Student design projects
• Characteristics
– Students bring together knowledge from different
sources:
• collaborate among themselves,
• share design knowledge
• negotiate with each other, faculty members
and the client, in order to create engineering
artifacts.
– Students reuse previous knowledge and create
new knowledge within the context of the
problem.
Engineering design projects
• Common Problems
– Within team knowledge sharing
– Across team knowledge sharing
– Global information access and integration
Engineering design projects
• Common problems of student projects
– Requirements deviations
– Difficulty in locating the right piece of
information
– Multiple versions of documents with
contradictory information
– Novices in design: Students lack the perspective
to structure and manage documents they
generate and use
Visionary Scenario
A student is working is developing a module
for a mobile device that involves a text to
speech application. The instructor tells her
that two years ago the class in this course
developed an OCR module for a cell-phone as
part of the Trinetra project to assist visually
impaired individuals in their daily activities,
namely shopping and public transportation.
She accesses the Trinetra DesignWeb through
the class web space.
Visionary Scenario
She quickly searches (using standard search)
to find the subweb for the OCR module. She
then browses within the OCR module exploring
various aspects of the OCR design from the
previous team.
Visionary Scenario
Finally she focuses on the modules on the
mobile device. She reads the segment of the
final report on the OCR mobile module as well
as some of the supporting documents that led
to the final decisions in the OCR design.
Visionary Scenario
She imports the OCR node (with its associated
document fragments, discussions and web
links) from the previous year’s DesignWeb and
link the node to her team’s current DesignWeb.
She makes a post on the Kiva discussing what
she found in the documents and propose some
new directions that build on the prior work
Objectives
• To create DesignWebs that
– represent the state of the project based on the
artifacts described in the project documents
– enable designers to search and navigate to find
relevant information quickly and efficiently
– evolve as the artifact, and the documents about
it, evolve.
Capturing in-process data
• For 4 years, RPCS has used the Kiva for
team collaboration
– Light-weight collaboration tool
– Combines functions of e-mail and bboards
– Widely accepted and liked by student teams; it
feels likes chat and meets their needs
– Each year’s Kiva has hundreds of threads and
thousands of posts and files
We have 4 years of data of all the team
conversations and files that would normally
go through email or chat
Kiva collaboration tool
• Takes advantage of students willingness to
send email, use IM, post on newsgroups,
send text messages
• Design goal: Create an interface that
students perceive to be equivalent to their
preferred communication modes; that is:
make it feel like chat
Design education testbed
• RPCS: Rapid prototyping of computer
systems
– Interdisciplinary, capstone design course
– Ambitious projects, e.g.
• GM companion car-driver interface
• Context aware cell-phone
• Wireless classroom on the Voyager science
boat
Challenges
• Levels of abstraction
• Alternate views for different users
• Credibility of source (transcripts of
meetings vs. final reports)
• Identifying the structure of created
knowledge, especially for different versions
of the same document
• Identifying the design intent
Strategy Overview
• Divide documents into topic segments
• Summarize each segment
• Cluster segments by semantic similarity (e.g.
revisions of same paragraph or similar paragraphs
from different sources)
• Perform co-word analysis to construct multiple
networks that map the strength of association
between keywords in textual data
• Develop graphical display algorithms that enable
users to search and navigate the graphs to access
the underlying documents
Conclusions
• Creating DesignWebs automatically from
student design documents is useful for
organizing the information into product
structures.
• These product structures can be used for
developing computational environments that
support systematic modeling and also for
characterizing design problems.
• DesignWebs can help us understand the
content and nature of information related to
various aspects of the artifact and how
designers generate and refine it.
Future Work
• Future research will incorporate the audio
transcripts of student discussions during team
meetings since our observation shows that
interesting discussions often happen there.
• We are currently focusing only on student
design projects; however, this research is
significant for professional designers working
on industrial projects as well.
Questions?