A study on the impact of HOVER platforms on design teams collaborative behaviors during collocated collective early preliminary design activities
Year: 2017
Editor: Anja Maier, Stanko Škec, Harrison Kim, Michael Kokkolaras, Josef Oehmen, Georges Fadel, Filippo Salustri, Mike Van der Loos
Author: Guerra, Andrea Luigi; Gidel, Thierry; Vezzetti, Enrico
Series: ICED
Institution: 1: UTC, Sorbonne Universités, France; 2: Politecnico di Torino, Italy
Section: Human Behaviour in Design
Page(s): 339-348
ISBN: 978-1-904670-96-4
ISSN: 2220-4342
Abstract
HOVER platforms are interactive digital working space composed of HOrizontal and VERtical interconnected tactile surfaces. Since ICED 2011, we defended the hypothesis that interactive surfaces can greatly increase the effectiveness of the early preliminary design phase by increasing collaboration. So it is pivotal to understand the impact of such interactive surfaces on collaborative behaviors of design teams. We present the TATIN-PIC HOVER platform, an example of HOVER platform, that we built as a test tool. We describe our experimental protocol to assess if HOVER platforms change the collaborative behaviors of design teams throughout the idea generation phase, compared to traditional pen-and-paper mediating tools. To achieve this goal, we compare pen-and-paper against HOVER platforms. We measure the equity of contributions in the common objectification process (i.e. writing concepts on post-it) with a sample of 40 young practitioners. Our preliminary results show that HOVER platforms tend to change collaborative behaviors from an exclusive collaboration mode to a mutual one. This opens interesting research paths that are presented in the conclusion.
Keywords: Collaborative design, Computer Aided Design (CAD), Workspaces for design, Conceptual design, Human behaviour in design