Supporting Distributed Design Thinking with the Help of Innovative Collaboration Tools.

Project proposal for the HPI Stanford Design Thinking Research Program Investigator: Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel Hasso-Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam Research Team: Justus Broß, Matthias Quasthoff, Dr. Harald Sack Hasso-Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam

Potsdam, July 12th, 2008

Abstract

As the Design Thinking Method is becoming increasingly popular and widespread worldwide, De-sign Thinkers expand their collaborations across regions and continents and are thus geographically dispersed, even across time zones. The visual and haptic components of the work space are so far hard to share over distance and time. Written documentation and communication work tend to sup-press creativity, curiosity, spontaneity and team experience. This project proposal on Design Re-search aims at designing and implementing new IT-tools, which truly support and optimize collabo-rative Design Thinking without getting in the way of the teams involved in the process. We will do so by testing the following two hypotheses:

First, distributed Design Thinking can be supported by suitable IT tools, hereafter referred to as "D-Tools 2.0". It requires tools to collect, annotate, and visualize multimedia data in an easy way, best automatically.

Second, tools and solutions found to support and improve the distributed Design Thinking Process by (semi-)automated documentation, annotation, and visualization can in turn improve the original Design Thinking process itself. The impact of these tools - intended or not- will be measured in both local and distributed settings.

The project's analysis is based upon former and present research about "distance collaboration work" and on coherent investigation about the processes, tools, information and communication flows as currently employed in the Design Thinking process. Our vision is to design and to imple-ment our D-Tools 2.0 in a way that they are able to collect, annotate, and visualize multimedia data (semi-)automatically and to truly support and improve the distributed Design Process without get-ting stuck with technicalities. By digitizing the content developed during design research, and by being able to share it over space and time, Design Thinking is furthermore suddenly made available for all sorts of interested people that were so far not associated or integrated with this process. Our D-tools are therefore making the Design Thinking process truly collaborative by adapting Web 2.0 functionalities.

1 Introduction Design Thinking is an approach towards building up ideas for practical and creative solutions. This process can be applied to problems as well as to things that need all sorts of improvement. The fo-cus on human beings--both designers and customers--is of central importance throughout the De-sign Thinking process. The people, way of working, environment, and feedback are central to de-sign thinking. The focus on multi-disciplinary teams facilitates to think outside the box. The exces-sive use of sticky notes, drawings, lego models and many more (unusual) methods appeals to the various human senses, instead of only using traditional media for creating and documenting ideas. The space design thinkers work in is usually very flexible and customizable, e.g. with the help of mobile furniture, to perfectly suit their needs. Customer feedback is essential throughout all phases of a design project. They are interviewed when the design team observes the customers' processes and terminology. They get presented results from later phases including early prototypes, to ensure the project they actually wanted. As feedback could convey dissent, it can be necessary for design thinkers to go one step back in the process and proceed all over from there, following the principle "fail early and often" [Brow08].

Design thinking is challenged whenever teams cannot work locally in the same space. Sharing hap-tics, three-dimensional furniture arrangements, and quick, informal chats over large distances is as hard as collaboratively working on a cardboard prototype if some team members are at remote loca-tions. The problem of collaboration gets more challenging if a team is scattered across different time zones. While it probably would still be possible to find meeting slots, working as one team will require non-real-time, i.e. written communication. However, being tied to computer systems and email or instant messaging and having to synchronize different media -- the team space, documenta-tion and communication -- will distort the design thinking process and very likely decrease team performance [CS99]. Over the course of this project, we would like to test two central hypotheses in order to elaborate the expected impact of the D-tools 2.0.

1. Distributed design thinking can benefit from the use of specialized digital equipment

2. Parts of the tools and solutions to overcome the challenges of distributed design thinking can be used to improve the design thinking process itself.

To test the first hypothesis, we will first investigate the current solutions to distributed design think-ing and their shortcomings. This investigation will lead towards our goal, to directly ideate and then prototype towards tools enabling seamless working in a distributed environment without imposing unnecessary technicalities on the participants. This will include finding a mapping of purely-analogue methods like sticky notes and cardboard models to digital representations that suit the de-sign thinkers' needs. While the tools should at all points in time feel intuitive, we see a need of de-signing tools towards being "unobtrusive" and independent from each other, i.e. let each design thinker decide in their own whether to use a specific tool or not. Communication and documentation needs to be accomplished in a way that design thinkers can freely choose whether to communicate in real-time, which media--written text, audio, video etc.--to use. For distributed design thinking there is also a need to store, transport, and restore information about the design thinking space, so design thinkers in different locations and time zones can share the same space.

The second hypotheses is backed by the estimation that the demand for written communication in distributed environments will possibly result in tools supporting automatic or semi-automatic docu-mentation, annotation and visualization. Assuming that these tools work with minimal User interac-tion only, their impact on non-distributed design thinking remains to be tested.

The remainder of this proposal is organized as follows. Section 2 describes what to analyze with Design Thinking teams, and the key questions to investigate in the very beginning of the project. Section 3 outlines the ideation process for tools to support distributed design thinking. Section 4 describes the design of experiment of this project, measuring the impact of IT tools on design think-ing performance. In Section 5, we describe the project phases comprising analysis, development, and evaluation. Section 6 describes the expected impact of our project on parties involved with de-sign thinking.

2 Analysis As a starting point, the process of design thinking including all applied tools has to be analyzed with special regard to tool applicability in a distributed environment. One major obstacle lies in the fact that analogue tools such as whiteboards with post-its cannot be easily shared with remote team members. Nevertheless, design thinking teams do already collaborate by using means of communi-cation and digital substitutes for analogue tools. Therefore, all currently applied tools ranging from analogue post-its to Email, collaborative Wikis, or Blogs have to be evaluated regarding the follow-ing questions:

- What tools are used in which phase of the design research process? - How and for which purpose are they used? - Are there special features of the tools and are they used or ignored? - Do design thinkers "like" existing IT-based solutions at all or do they prefer analogue devices?

Remote communications is predominantly limited in expressivity, even more whenever IT-based solutions require media breaks, as e.g., switching from whiteboard drawings and post-it layouts to a Wiki. Limited expressivity often causes misunderstandings and interferes with progress. On the other hand, the demand to transcribe visual, graphical, of haptic settings also affects or limits team member's imagination, while remote team members have to obey different time constraints that draw their attention away. Also, the distributed Design Thinking process will be applied in various infrastructural environments, ranging from special purpose design thinking spaces over public meet-ing rooms and offices to the private home office.

3 Development of ideas and prototypes During the course of the proposed project, we plan to develop IT-supported tools to improve dis-tributed design thinking. Those tools could aim at problems that are introduced or insufficiently solved by existing IT tools in use, and at those problems that are not yet being addressed by IT solu-tions at all [BH97]. Following design thinking itself during development of these tools, it is a main objective to not distort design thinking while introducing them. Rather, these tools do their job without imposing on the design thinking process or drawing attention from design thinking teams.

To not exclude any design team, we aim at creating flexible solutions working in an off-the-shelf infrastructure, such as well-known standards like email, the World Wide Web, or widely deployed software like Skype or office software. Additionally, we plan to create a number of smaller tools that can be used independently from each other rather than to create one monolithic system that forces design teams to use it on a „all or nothing“ basis. This is especially important as design thinking teams include people from many different disciplines, not all of them necessarily sharing the same amount of computer usage. Depending on the analysis results, the tools to be developed can include the following

• infrastructure supporting communication and documentation from different locations, • visualization aids like autonomous cameras, projectors, and special software around these, • large numbers of very small, specialized interactive and customizable devices, such as knobs, • buttons, sensors, hand gear, speakers and displays to be placed anywhere in the design thinking

space

Each tool will address specific human needs and problems identified during the analysis. Presuma-bly, some tools will also be designed to help storing and restoring the present state of the team space. So, during tool development, the results will be categorized by their nature (online, local, ambient), their purpose, and by the sense the adhere to.

4 Design of Experiment The objective to the investigation within this project is to ultimately improve and enable the distrib-uted design thinking process by implementing supportive technology without adding technicalities. The variables controlled throughout the experiment (also known as design variables) are the differ-ent categories of tools divided by visibility (ambient vs. centralized systems), the human needs they address as well as the technical process task they support. Of special interest will be the investiga-tion, to what extend Design Team Members use either the hitherto existing tools or those tools de-veloped in the line of this project in the moment when they have the freedom of choice between the two. It will furthermore be controlled, if the amount of documentation and communication, pro-duced with different technology enabled tools/helpers either in local-to-local or in local-to-remote scenarios, differs. Most important design variable will be the analysis if any total improvement in the final output of the design thinking methodology could be measured. This boils down to the question if D-School "customers" were even more satisfied with project outcomes of Design Think-ing Teams after our recommended "technology add-on"?

The variables measured to describe the outcome of the experimental runs (response variables) and to examine their precision include the measurement of time used for communication, documenta-tion as well as the input delay of several dislocated design team members. In detail this measure-ment includes the identification, analysis and distinguishing the information flow in process docu-mentation and communication

1. as part of the design process, 2. as a necessity for any project management in general, 3. related to the scattering of participants and ultimately 4. related to technology enabled tools/helpers.

Furthermore it is of interest for this experiment to measure the differences of the contribution to the actual design process by the different Design Teams. It will consequently be monitored in this re-gard, if there are differences regarding the amount, as well as the quality of contributions by those teams or single team members. In doing so quantity of contribution will be measured in an objec-tive-, and the quality levels of contribution in a rather subjective manner.

5 Experiment Analysis, tool ideation, prototyping, and testing will be carried out adhering to the design thinking process. In the course of the proposed project, we plan to carry out several iterations of observation and development. The first and second iteration will comprise visits to Design Teams in Pots-dam/Waldorf and Stanford/Palo Alto. After the second iteration and approximately six months, we

will organize a workshop to which distributed Design-Teams and -Researchers will be invited and where the obtained ideas, tools, and results will be presented and discussed.

The experiment defined in the previous section will be carried out throughout the project duration. In the beginning, when no tools are yet developed on our own, team performance and distraction will be measured as defined in the previous section. Later, when our tools can be tested, we will measure team performance with respect to the level of usage of tools. After the workshop we will consider obtained feedback and conduct an intensive testing period. This period will result in the final iteration of tool development and refinement. The results of the overall experiment will be presented at the International Conference on Engineering Design 2009, August 24-27. Refer to the time table in the appendix for details.

6 Outcome The solution to be delivered and analyzed, our D-Tools 2.0, strictly aim at supporting Design Thinking and reinstalling paradigms of the design thinking process that have previously been spoiled by working geographically dispersed. The specific impact of the recommended D-Tools 2.0 depends on the direction derived from analysis and project iterations. Hence, students new to De-sign Thinking should experience our tools as a support for understanding the process rather than a hurdle. People already accustomed to the process should be able to use D-Tools 2.0 with minimal cognitive effort. The tools should thus appear natural for Design Thinking.

Design Thinking teachers should be supported in observing and evaluating the Design Thinking process. This can either be achieved by using tools that facilitate the measurement of the aforemen-tioned variables even outside the setting of our experiment. This can alternatively be achieved by tools designed to monitor communication and documentation. The suggested tools should further-more be configurable regarding security and time constraints as requested by the Design Thinking process.

D-tools 2.0 already provide a digital interface for documentation and communication. Detached from their physical representation their virtual functionality can also be reproduced remotely with-out additional effort, as e.g., in a web browser. Thereby new members can also be included to De-sign Thinking teams without using dedicated design thinking space, by only being virtually con-nected via their mobile internet devices anyplace and anytime.

Finally, D-Tools 2.0 can serve the d.school and potential industry partners as a „hot line“ to their Design Teams, e.g. by giving them real-time insight in the design team‘s work.

Appendix

References [CS99] P. Carstensen, K. Schmidt. Computer supported cooperative work: New challenges to

systems design. In K. Itoh (Ed.), Handbook of human factors, 1999.

[BH97] H. Beyer, K. Holtzblatt. Contextual Design - Defining Customer-Centered Systems, Morgan-Kaufmann, 1997.

[Brow08] T. Brown. Design Thinking. In Harvard Business Review, June 2008, Harvard Business Press, pp. 84-92,

Budget

Salaries To conduct the proposed research and to realize the objectives, two full-time PhD students with interdisciplinary background are necessary. One computer scientist to implement the technology based design Thinking Tools in hardware and software and also a communication designer for de-veloping new, interactive, and customizable user interfaces. Both should also support the entire life cycle of analysis and experiment.

During the runtime of the project, the two main researchers should be supported by 2 student work-ers for conducting and evaluating experiments, supportive programming, testing, and evaluation of developed tools, etc.

• 1 x full-time PhD scholarship, computer science, 25.000 Euros per year • 1 x full-time PhD scholarship, communication design, 25.000 Euros per year • 2 x student workers, each 10.000 Euros per year

Travel Expenses Subject of evaluation and development is the distributed Design Thinking process. Therefore, dis-tributed design thinking working groups will be observed and interviewed in different locations to understand the differences in the distributed vs. the local design thinking process. In addition, the results of the project are to be published at the International Conference on Engineering Design 2009 (ICED 2009), August 24-27 in Stanford, USA.

• 2 researchers travelling to Waldorf for 1 week during 1st iteration: 2.000 Euros • 2 researchers travelling to Palo Alto, USA for 1 week during 2nd iteration: 4.000 Euros • 2 researchers participating at ICED 2009 at Stanford, USA: 4.000 Euros

Workshop After 6 months, a workshop will be organized at HPI, Potsdam to present the ideas, tools, and re-sults as well as to gather feedback and guiding directions for ongoing work. Project Workshop: 2.500 Euros

Required Infrastructure For the development of IT-based tools to support the distributed Design Thinking process, hardware and software for development and operational prototype have to be provided.

• Development/operational hardware and software (desktop PC, PC Notebook, different mo-bile devices): 8.000 Euros

• Multimedia Equipment (cameras, electronic whiteboard, printer, beamer...): 8.000 Euros • Supplies and minor equipment (printer toner, paper, batteries, storage devices, microphones,

headsets,etc.): 1.500 Euros

Overall required budget: 100.000 Euros

Project Timeline

Resume of Investigator Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel Dr. sc. nat. Christoph Meinel (1954) is the CEO and President of the Hasso Plattner Institute for IT-Systems Engineering (HPI) and full professor (C4) for computer science at the University of Pots-dam.

Christoph Meinel studied Mathematics and Computer Sciences at the Humboldt University Berlin from 1974-79. He received his PhD degree in 1981. From 1981-1991 he worked for the Department of Mathematics at Humboldt University and at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sci-ences in Berlin as a scientific researcher. In 1988 he received his State Doctorate (“Habilitation”) with a thesis on complexity theory that was published as Springer Lecture Notes (Vol. 370). After research stays at universities of Saarbrücken and Paderborn 1992 he was appointed a full professor (C4) for computer science at the University of Trier. Since 2004 he is president and CEO of the HPI in Potsdam and full professor (C4) for Inter-net- and WWW-Technologies. Beside his professorship in Potsdam he is a professor both at the School of Computer Science of the Technical University of Beijing (China) and at the Luxembourg Institute of Advanced Studies in Information Technology at the University of Luxembourg.

Christoph Meinel is author or co-author of 7 text books and monographs and of various con-ference proceedings. He has published more than 300 scientific papers in highly recognised international scientific journals and conferences. His high-security solution Lock-Keeper is international patented and licensed by Siemens AG. Most of his publications and recordings of his lectures can be freely accessed on the Internet (www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/meinel or www.tele-task.de). His main research interests and activities focus on applied research and engineering in Internet Technology and Sys-tems, particularly in the fields Trust and Security Engineering, Web-University and Secure Tele-medicine as well as in Computational Complexity and in formal (BDD-based) methods for IT-system design and verification.

Beside his work as a university professor, from 1998 to 2002 Christoph Meinel was CEO and direc-tor of the Research Lab “Institute for Telematics” in Trier where most of the budget came from ap-plied research projects with industrial partners. The expertise of the institute laid mainly in the fields: Internet Security, Electronic Publishing / E-Learning and Telemedicine. In between 1996-2007 Christoph Meinel also was member of the scientific board of the IBFI Schloß Dagstuhl and speaker of the special interest group on complexity of the German society “Gesellschaft für Infor-matik” (GI). Since 2007 he is chairman of the German IPv6 Council.

Christoph Meinel is chief editor of the scientific electronic journal “ECCC – Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity” and of the “IT-Gipfelblog”. As a member of various international scientific boards and program committees he has organised many international symposia and con-ferences. In 2006, as the president of HPI he hosted the first German “National IT-Summit” of the German Federal Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel.