Conversational grounding and visual access in collaborative design

Abstract

The present study investigates the role of visual access in supporting the exchange of positive evidence of mutual understanding in collaborative design. Pairs of designers worked on two design problems differing in the mix of gestural and speech cues needed to signal mutual understanding, either in full view of each other, or within each others' hearing but without shared visual access to each others' design activities. Designers' use of conversational speech, gesture, and representational media varied systematically as they adjusted to the loss of visual access. Nevertheless, they did achieve acceptable design solutions under these conditions. The changing patterns of conversational and workspace activity we observed have the potential to inform the design and application of augmented reality interfaces that attempt seamlessly to blend real and virtual images and objects, and we draw out some human factors implications of these interfaces for helping designers think and share design ideas.

Keywords:

• Design interaction; Collaboration; Design discourse; Design problem solving

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a paper entitled “Unpicking the invisible stitches in seamless interfaces: a human factors study of visual access in collaborative design”, presented to the 10th International Conference on Concurrent Engineering, Madeira, 26 – 30 July, 2003, parts of which are reproduced here with the permission of the publisher. We gratefully acknowledge the contribution made to this research by our participants, and by the support provided by a University of Plymouth Research Scholarship to the second author.

Notes

¹© 2002 Noldus Information Technology.