All of the papers in this issue focus on the development and use of computer technology. In ‘Virtual environments for collaborative design: Requirements and guidelines from a social action perspective’, Vosinakis, Koutsabasis, Stavrikis, Viorres and Darzentas are concerned with collaborative virtual environments. Such environments, they argue, are becoming essential in a wide range of design domains, such as product, interior, architectural, and automotive design. However, according to Vosinakis et al., these systems have been designed using approaches that fail to acknowledge everyday collaborative design activities. The research described in this paper seeks to remedy this omission by taking a social action standpoint to yield understanding that can be embedded in collaborative virtual environment guidelines. To illustrate the application of the resultant guidelines they describe the development of a collaborative virtual environment for interior design. The main conclusions arising from the work are that the application of the theory of social action enables understanding of collaborative design at levels of abstraction that are useful in constructing design and development guidelines.
Whereas the paper of Vosinakis et al. concerns social action in the round and how we might design computer environments to support the particular domain of collaborative design, in ‘Visualising the social dynamics of team collaboration’, Vande Moere, Dong and Clayden focus on the specific problem of reflecting this activity back to a collaborating design team during the design process. They argue that teamwork is an activity in which people share knowledge, perceptions and ideas to achieve a common goal. Successful teams, they argue, exhibit collective mind, which can be facilitated by representations of team social dynamic, thereby increasing the quality of the collaboration process as well as its outcome. Having described the development and testing of several representational methods, Vande Moere et al. conclude with two claims. The first is that by providing computational analysis and depictions of teamwork with sufficient social lucidity to allow teams and team managers to troubleshoot problems, these methods contribute to the current body of tools for assessing teamwork, which are difficult to apply and inadequate for dealing with the real-time nuances of team collaboration. Their second claim is that the different data visualisation metaphors used in their methods are appropriate to different purposes: one being effective for representing numerically exact measurements of social dynamic; another being effective for representing the dynamic of interpersonal relationships; and the last being effective for capturing abstract concepts, such as the content of team mental models.
Finally, in contrast to the previous two papers, which are concerned with the design of computer technology to support the collaborative design process, in ‘A participatory design approach to information architecture design for children’, Baek and Lee's interest is the collaborative design of computer technology for children. In this regard, they argue that collaborative design with children of products for children should take into consideration childhood characteristics such age and cognitive, motor-sensory and language development, etc. They claim that although a variety of methods and guidelines have emerged regarding design for children, few require the direct involvement of the child user. Participatory design on the other hand, requires a design process in which users are involved in the generation of design ideas. Hence, in theory, participatory design should enable designers to look at matters with the child's viewpoint. Their paper describes the development and use of two participatory design toolkits in information architecture design for children. The main findings are that participatory design with children is effective for determining their needs, whilst at the same time helping designers to look at problems from the child's standpoint. The designs produced with children reflected developmental level, e.g., the resultant information architecture being generally shallower and wider, with more ambiguous content containing more logical errors than similar architecture developed by adults on behalf of children. Consequently, Baek and Lee recommend that information architectures for children need to reflect the child's mind, notwithstanding the fact that such designs may appear flawed from the adult perspective.