This doctoral dissertation, titled "Techniques and Artefacts for Documenting Design Rationale Among Multidisciplinary Design Teams," by Marisela Gutierrez Lopez, investigates the collaborative practices and digital tools used by multidisciplinary design teams following a user-centered approach to create interactive systems. The research focuses on how designers document and communicate design rationale to team members from different disciplines, addressing the challenges of miscommunication due to diverse priorities, vocabularies, and preferences.
The dissertation presents three core contributions:
1. **Uncovering Collaboration Issues**: It identifies issues related to collaboration, such as communication, information sharing, and documentation of design processes and outcomes, which inform the design of tools to support collaborative practices.
2. **Designing Tools for Documentation**: It proposes two tools—Helaba and Decision Cards—to facilitate the documentation of design rationale and decisions. Helaba is an interactive prototype that captures communication streams and artifact evolution in a shared workspace, while Decision Cards are a lightweight format for documenting design decisions, including information on what, why, and by whom a decision was made.
3. **Evaluating the Approach**: It evaluates the proposed tools through a longitudinal study of a full user-centered design (UCD) project, from initial idea generation to high-fidelity prototypes, to understand how they enable collaboration and support the documentation of design rationale.
The research is grounded in user-centered design principles and is informed by qualitative methods such as interviews, ethnographic observations, and workshops. The dissertation aims to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical aspects of design documentation, providing insights into how digital tools can support multidisciplinary design teams in creating interactive systems.This doctoral dissertation, titled "Techniques and Artefacts for Documenting Design Rationale Among Multidisciplinary Design Teams," by Marisela Gutierrez Lopez, investigates the collaborative practices and digital tools used by multidisciplinary design teams following a user-centered approach to create interactive systems. The research focuses on how designers document and communicate design rationale to team members from different disciplines, addressing the challenges of miscommunication due to diverse priorities, vocabularies, and preferences.
The dissertation presents three core contributions:
1. **Uncovering Collaboration Issues**: It identifies issues related to collaboration, such as communication, information sharing, and documentation of design processes and outcomes, which inform the design of tools to support collaborative practices.
2. **Designing Tools for Documentation**: It proposes two tools—Helaba and Decision Cards—to facilitate the documentation of design rationale and decisions. Helaba is an interactive prototype that captures communication streams and artifact evolution in a shared workspace, while Decision Cards are a lightweight format for documenting design decisions, including information on what, why, and by whom a decision was made.
3. **Evaluating the Approach**: It evaluates the proposed tools through a longitudinal study of a full user-centered design (UCD) project, from initial idea generation to high-fidelity prototypes, to understand how they enable collaboration and support the documentation of design rationale.
The research is grounded in user-centered design principles and is informed by qualitative methods such as interviews, ethnographic observations, and workshops. The dissertation aims to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical aspects of design documentation, providing insights into how digital tools can support multidisciplinary design teams in creating interactive systems.