A4HoehlKohMcCabeMeyers

A4HoehlKohMcCabeMeyers

To-Do

1. which was the most interesting idea/concept you learned from the article?
2. articulate what you did not understand in the article but it sounded interesting and you would like to know more about it
3. compare the ideas/argumentation/functionality for DODEs with the EDC demonstration given in the class meeting on February 11!
4. one major objective of the article, the commentaries, and the reply is to understand the best role distribution between humans and computers in joint human-computer systems (or socio-technical environments)! Comment of this issues from your personal experience!

Most interesting idea/concept

Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, and Reseeding.

This paper was published almost one and half decades ago, but it had great provision on the potential role of users as producers. The most important idea I'd like to focus is the term of users, especially end users. Here, Gerhard did not describe the term of prosumer which means the consumer who produces directly but indicated the role of users was going to shift from passive role to active one. Traditionally, users were the ones who received services, artifacts and consumed them. Their role was set as consumer. However, they started to participate in production as Gerhard mentioned.
I think that we can apply this idea to Web 2.0 system as it is. If there is one different thing, it would be users' activities are not limited in users' groups. Users, now, they can contribute as much as they want to. In other words, they are already spreading seeds in this evolutionary growth. Probably, the initial seed might be distributed by experts (domain designer or environment developer), but in reseeding phase the seed distributor is not confined to software designer.Open source group, Wikipedia , or Google 3D warehouse could be good examples.

What you did not understand

Although a claim is made that DODE's can make major contributions to immature domains with design criteria that are not fully defined, no discussion is made for how one can effectively create a DODE that assists in creative environments that thrive on not having strong or explicit design rules. In other words, how would one create a DODE that encourages creativity instead of stymieing it? The analysis of DODE's focuses on providing construction kits and critics that are supported through the SER model of growth. However, this has a strong implication that as the domain's community contributes content, more rules and restrictions will evolve and creativity and new ideas will suffer. As a practical example, one could look at Photoshop, which is generally targeted for artists and creative exploration. In the terms of the article, Photoshop has little more to offer than being a labyrinthian tool kit. Yet, how would one evolve Photoshop to add construction kits, critics, and specification sheets that motivate users to be creative, be artistic, break rules, and produce novel content?

Compare DODE with EDC

The EDC embodies many of the characteristics and conditions of DODE systems including providing: construction kits, specification components, some catalog functionality, and a simulation component. In the systems we saw on Monday the EDC seemed to provide many virtual tools and tangible pieces composing the construction kit of pieces in each project domain. The specification components in the EDC allow stakeholders to engage in iterative design both individually and collaboratively using the construction kits. The loose catalog feature allows participants to save design states, facilitating the translation between various ideas while retaining designs for future restoration. Last but not least, the most salient DODE characteristic featured in the EDC it's ability to engage the designers in simulations. For example, how participants in the city planning exercise can take on personas and simulate buses moving on virtual routes.

On the other had, EDC does not to my knowledge allow participants to restore designs from previous sessions, the full cataloging feature. Although the EDC provides both action and reflection spaces, that can contain information or statistics meant to reveal possible errors or problems with a design, the system does not explicitly seem to bring any possible concerns to light as stated by the argumentation hypermedia system component. Finally, the EDC does not allow participants, or end-users, to modify or extend the underlying system functionality.

Comment on the best role distribution

Improving the user interface will enable the user to more effectively receive the full potential of the program. The objective is to make living in the real world easier by using the artificial world (such as computers) to aid us in tasks. The easier it is for the user to manipulate computers, the easier their lives become.

A real life example is the computer system that has replaced the parking meters in lots all over campus. When parking your car for a given amount of time, you naturally consider what time it is currently and what time you are planning to leave. Instead of showing you the current time and a list of possible times to leave, the screen shows a list of possible lengths of stay. The user must do some unnecessary calculations to determine which option they should chose, and this process is much more difficult without the assistance of a clock or the ability to do quick computations mentally. Keeping the user in mind when designing systems can lead to much more efficiency. The role of the user is to decide when they need to be places and the role of the computer system is to provide all of the information and perform all of the calculations that are involved so that the task can be performed with minimal effort.