Supporting mutual understanding in collaborative design project

International audience

This paper presents the research design and preliminary findings from a study on supporting online students in a collaborative design project. The Collaborative Investigation, Design, Evaluation and Revision (CIDER) approach was used to scaffold the learning activities. CIDER is a learn-technology-by-design approach for collaborative resource design and development. This phase of the study was conducted in a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education unit at an Australian university. Participants, working in small groups, collaboratively developed electronic teaching resources, including a digital story and a website. Data sources for this study include student artefacts, evaluation data, survey data and peer-review feedback from two unit cohorts. The results indicate that geographical proximity was not the key factor in the group's success; rather, a shared disciplinary area was a better indicator of the students' ability to develop an online resource. Moreover, the results indicate that formative evaluation via a peer review process offered a practical way of determining the quality or potential quality of a web-based learning resource before it is published.

The student members of the Collaborative Space (systems) Design (CSD) project discuss its implementation and highlight its concepts. The CSD project is an elective course at the MSc Space Flight programme at the Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, where students exercise the design process of a space mission, spacecraft or a major spacecraft subsystem in a team setting, along with several important external stakeholders. Focus was given to the application of concurrent engineering and systems engineering techniques. Interaction between the students and the external stakeholders was also extremely valued. Two teams participated, one designing a liquid oxygen electric pump and one a CubeSat asteroid observer mission. In this work the students report their experience, highlighting how they approached the different phases of the design process. Positives and negatives of the course are also presented, together with some feedback on potential
 modifications to future editions of the course.

This article reports on a case of participatory self-directed online learning within the context of a graduate-level instructional technology course. The course was about online learning environments and relied on both asynchronous and synchronous technologies. In this case, the instructor and students engaged in collaborative course design through one of the assignments where student teams and the instructor led one week’s worth of course activities and discussions. This article begins with a discussion of the literature on participatory self-directed online learning. Then, the article presents an overview of the course design, detailed discussion of the assignment that framed student participatory self-directed learning and two examples of student assignments. The framing question for organising this case was as follows: What lessons can a team of graduate students and the instructor learn about self-directed participatory online learning from a collaborative design project? The article ends with the overall lessons learned from the case and implications to future design of online activities.

A collaborative design project has been implemented in a junior-level materials selection and manufacturing course. The team-based design problem involved the design of playground equipment for elementary school children. Focus groups of elementary students and a review of applicable construction standards were used to set design requirements. Each team comprised undergraduate on-campus students, undergraduate distance education students and junior/senior high school technology students. Initial design choices were made by the entire group. Subsequent calculations of stress, deformations, etc. to refine the design as well as choices of materials and manufacturing processes were primarily the purview of the undergraduate students. Drafting and integration of the design segments into a complete computer model was the responsibility of the high school students. Continuous communication between the groups was required for the process to be successful. This collaboration was facilitated via online forums and site visits. An overview of the project structure is presented along with a summary of the project outcomes and recommendations for improving the process.

The mental state S of an agent A refers to the state of an agent described using attributes such as beliefs, intentions, commitments, capabilities, plan, etc. We argue that attributes of mental states should not only correspond to their commonsense counterparts as suggested in (Shoham, 1993), but also that their semantics be mutually understood by all the agents the agent A is likely to interact with. Mutual understanding or agreement involves infinitely recursive beliefs, and we propose that, for action performing agents, they need to be truncated at a finite depth and supported with explicit assumptions and inference rules resulting in actions on the world. We also propose that an intelligent agent must also have apt attribute called awareness, which like mutual beliefs, is infinitely recursive, and for practical reasoning purposes must be truncated. We propose a mental structure of an agent as a hierarchy of knowledge structures Kn, kn-1, ..., K0, where Ki implements the abstract mental substate Si. We finally work out an example discussing the role played by a few selected mental attributes such as intention, commitment, etc, and make suggestions for future work. >

The human is not to be just geological appendage of the biosphere or noosphere, the human is to enable the reality to "contemplate" its existence through orderly and arranged interaction of subjects, in terms of the "view" of its subjects - thinking human beings who have the ability to be conscious of the existence of the reality. It is expedient to present the role of a man (a thinking human being, whose features and characteristics are ordered and arranged into a concrete individual personality) as a "catalyst" of signs manifesting the existence of this sphere of reality, contemplation of which from the point of view of the thinking human can create the conditions for understanding this sphere of reality as the reality existing in interaction of changes of modes and features of many objects in this sphere of the reality. Theory of journalism must ground substantially and outline clearly the principles of purposeful communication of people in the totality of their relationship, interaction, mutual understanding, manifested in the process of joint activities and cognitive-transformational activity in certain area of reality. Due to the fact that the principle of communication applies to the whole set of objects of a given area of reality, it is obviously expedient to present communication between objects-minded creatures in a certain field of reality as a phenomenon of philology of communication, the subject of which reflects the features of human ways of interconnection, interaction and mutual understanding, based on the ability of thinking, presenting ideas in concepts and images, and communicating their essence to each other through signs and emotions.

The architectural design requires collaboration among various participants, such as architects, clients, engineers in the stages of the design process. The Sasada laboratory has been involved in the various collaborative architectural design projects. The authors found several important issues in the process of those projects. Firstly, the presentation data is composed of different kinds of data such as documents, computer generated still images, movies and 3D objects. The participants involved in those projects need to access these data as necessary. Secondly, it is virtually impossible for all participants to attend at the same time and place. Therefore, computer networked collaborative design work is essential, in particular, for an international project and for a complex architectural design project.

Communication is one of the most important factors in the mental and social development of a child. Only in contact with adults is it possible for children to assimilate the social and historical experience of humanity and to realize their innate ability to become representatives of the human race. The lack and limitation of communication slows down and impoverishes the development of the child. The problem of pedagogical communication is devoted to a significant number of studies, the analysis of which reveals several aspects in its study. With their help, teachers master the ways of interaction, develop sociability. Another direction is the study of the problem of mutual understanding between teachers and students. They are significant due to the fact that contact is possible only under conditions of sufficiently complete mutual understanding between the communicants, the achievement of which requires the search for certain conditions and techniques. Keywords: pedagogical communication, communicative, interactive, perceptual components, communication style, oral, visual, symbolic and kinetic means, pedagogical communication styles

This paper focuses on the creative side of collaboration and constructs a support system that enhances designers’ creativity during collaborative design projects. In order to support creative group activity during such endeavors, the support system proposed here enables design team members to visualize the interactive communication processes during creative group activity from two viewpoints, one global, and the other local. In the global view of communication flow, the transition of topics and relationships between topics are visualized, whereas in the local view, the details of each communication process can be visualized. Both these types of visualization have two inherent merits. The first is to help designers clearly understand the flow of interactive communication processes and enable them to effectively balance two concurrent actions: their individual creative thinking, and their intercommunication with fellow design team members. The second merit stems from sharing the process of exploring new ideas. Generally, the discovery and initial germination of new ideas is done alone, via individual cogitation, and the sharing of individual explorative processes and areas of exploration is often difficult. However, the visualization procedure proposed in this paper can represent such processes and areas at a useful level of detail, so that team members can cooperatively explore new ideas as a group and derive synergistic benefits. Thus, the two merits of the proposed system can lead to more effective and efficient creative group activity.Copyright © 2004 by ASME

The development of computer graphics and Internet technology has created a 3D Web-based virtual world that has transformed the global fashion industry environment. In this study, the application cases of 3D virtual fashion education were analyzed to discuss the necessity and application of a 3D apparel CAD curriculum as part of a special education for global fashion talent at Korean fashion-related colleges. Prior studies, literature, photo data and Internet data (in and out of Korea) were used for this study. The demonstration case studies were conducted for the virtual fashion education ``SLCC 2007`` of Buffalo State College (U.S.), ``Ratava`s Line (2004)`` of SFU/FIT Collaborative Design Project (Canada and U.S.) and ``2011 Graduation Fashion Show`` of Ueda Fashion College (Japan). The results of the study show that the 3D apparel CAD system (as a core technology of the IT fashion industry) would allow the current mass production concept to change to a new paradigm of ``mass customization`` along with new fashion business types that include global fashion companies and Web-based Internet, mobile and virtual-world shopping malls. In addition, it appears that the system should be included in the curriculum of fashion-related colleges and institutes to educate technical designers for the global fashion industry and global fashion talent with comprehensive system operation and management ability, and to promote single proprietor companies.

To improve first year engineering students' understanding of the design process, a collaborative bridge design project is given to Architectural Engineering students during their first year at Penn State. This paper examines the benefits of reverting to traditional physical prototyping techniques for students to better understand the design process and how to compose and interpret design documents. Students create a preliminary set of design documents, exchange documents with a group of their peers, physically build a prototype of their peers' design, and synthesize design feedback. This process of generating feedback from another group's design through building their bridge benefits the students by allowing them to improve their design document comprehension skills and by gaining formative design feedback from another group of students in their class. After the prototyping activity: students were more likely to recognize areas of deficiency of their own work as well as the work of others; they could comprehend their peers' work well enough to accurately predict the primary design intent of their peers' designs; and the quality of the design documentation submitted improved over prior semesters that did not involve a prototyping design review activity. While this exploratory research suggests several distinct learning benefits based on the obtained data, it was also found that students' self-reports suggest that they do not necessarily recognize the learning benefits from this type of prototyping activity.

The Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has conducted a series of experimental design studios, as part of a larger ongoing research endeavour called The Design Studio of the Future, an interdisciplinary effort focusing on geographically distributed computer-mediated design and work group collaboration issues. A recent exploration was a collaborative design project joining geographically dispersed design students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners from Kumamoto University, Kyoto Institute of Technology, and MIT to examine the nature of computer networked collaborative environments and advanced computer-aided design technologies to support architectural education and practice. This paper will describe this project, which provided the students and faculty members with practical experience in the use of emerging technologies for collaboration, design, and communication in both the day-to-day activities of distributed groupwork as well as in the more formalized reviews.

With support of the European Union, the Makerere School of Public Health in Uganda developed the SPEED project in collaboration with local (civil society) organisations and research institutes. In the project the partners developed the Roadmap for developing a strategy for Universal Health Coverage in Uganda. Through conferences, workshops, social media, policy briefs the researchers interacted with decision makers. The Ministry of Health Adopted to Roadmap as the guidance for further strategic development of UHC. Most important lesson learned: collaboration between academics, administrators, and activists can have a positive impact on health policy development, if built on trust and mutual understanding.

Communication is a dynamic process, in constant mutation and evolution, non-linear, intrinsic to man himself, because it is the way to externalize, share, share, behaviors, attitudes, feelings, ideas, opinions, and thus obtain feed-back of the recipients, and thus, redirect communication towards mutual understanding, which is the main objective of communication. From the 90s we entered the era of individualization of the media, where each person can participate in the construction of information and where each person can be a communicative whole. However, the new form of communication is supported by a technological base capable of establishing in an interactive, participatory and fast way, encouraging the participation and interaction of each other, as well as the more effective use of participation and intention with the community. Electronic and digital communication, in addition to being increasingly an excellent way to communicate, due to the fact that it is efficient in terms of processing speed, ease of use and being extremely economical, since it is enough to have two computers connected to the Internet to communicate way you find most convenient. The aim of this work is a theoretical and conceptual reflection on the role of personal communication in the learning dynamics of individuals as communicating elements that interact with the communicational whole.