Existing computational tools and participation

Different computational tools are designed to support the communication between group members to various degrees. Some tools provide the basis for participants to communicate via a shared workspace [29, 31]. Other tools support the communication process by recording the structure of issues raised in the participation process (gIBIS [32]). And still other tools can elicit issues from multiple participants, provide feedback and guidance, as well as perform analysis to detect discrepancies between different views (KSS0 [33]).

These tools and others do not have facilities to support some of the participation requirements for tools outlined above; such as, maintenance of contexts, threads, and perspectives. Furthermore, all the above tools were developed for collaboration among group members familiar with the use of computers, and independent of their effectiveness in practical use, no assumption about the proficiency of users with computers can be made with respect to participation in disciplines remote from computers at best for the time being.

In our work on design research, the issues and requirements for participation tools raised in this paper became apparent in the development of support tools for engineering design. The issues of design, implementation and incorporation of the design tools as an integral part of the working of a design organization made us confront the issue of participation and its scope. This research has been applied to the n-dimThe project [34, 35, 36]. While the primary aim of this project is to build a computational support tool for engineering design, this tool had to have similar properties to participatory tools; these include maintenance and reconciliation of multi-perspectives, autonomy of individual perspective and, maintenance of contexts and threads of discussions and negotiations. These conclusions were reached on the basis of empirical studies of engineering design conducted by some of us and by others [37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44].

Some of the significant findings were:

• Designers typically spend as most 15% of their time doing standard analytical tasks, the rest being spent negotiating various aspects of the design.
• Communication between designers occur in a variety of forms (e.g., text, gestures), media (e.g., drawings, video), and modes (e.g., formal meetings, corridor chat).
• Many errors in and failures of design occur due to misscommunication and incomplete information integration and flow.
• In large organizations, some individuals assume the task of keeping historical records of previous projects in idiosyncratic forms. These individuals become the `librarians' of part of the organization's most critical information.
• Different designers (and groups of designers) use different vocabularies to describe the same or very closely related sets of things.
• Individuals tend to organize information in ways understandable to them, generally in the form of sketches and notes. There is a substantial overhead in merging these different views to arrive at a consensus.
• Tools that discover terminological differences can focus negotiations and improve the use of information.

From these observations, we have identified some basic features that we have found to be important in satisfying the requirements elaborated earlier. In the following section we identify the features and their role addressing the requirements through an example.