A8WeLovePeaches

A8WeLovePeaches

To-Do

Create a response as a group to the following questions:

1. how and to which extent does the EDC support individual and/or social creativity?
2. which features of the EDC (if any) did you find interesting / impressive?
3. which features are missing from the EDC?

how and to which extent does the EDC support individual and/or social creativity?

One group member believed it supports both individual and group creativity by having a tabletop format. One person or a group can be creative limited only by the types of pieces and what they can represent. However, another member thinks there are potential issues with an assumed benefit of ‘social creativity’. In order for true social creativity to succeed in this environment, it would be necessary for collaborative effort to be evident in every group member – this is not the democratic environment many people like to try and initiate. There needs to be a consensus that interactions, conversations and direction are shared rather than determined by a leader. Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory is a type of HCC which help the interaction between user and computer. Through the EDC interface, you can face the complex problems of environmental design more efficiently and realistically than using an abstract 2-dimensional representation, or textual descriptions. One of the main ways that EDC contributes to individual/ social creativity is that it uses the idea of the Symmetry of Ignorance, in which the designer tries to understand users’ methods. By doing this, the ‘clashing of two cultures’ can bring together some brand new ideas that might not have been concluded without help from the user or in other cases the designer. Adding the two groups together should create a feeling comfortable from contributing no matter which group a person might fall into.

which features of the EDC (if any) did you find interesting / impressive?

One group member found it interesting because it reminded him of when he was a kid playing with blocks and legos and cars, building whatever he wanted. This seems like the same idea. Another group member noted that even though this is not a real world, you can indirectly face the complex problem closely as opposed to just watching through a monitor screen. That will help users to face the problem and understand it more efficiently. A third group member found that the motivation for EDC was somewhat the same as many other open-sourced design activities. Many people are satisfied with a reward system that might not include a physical reward but self-gratification is a big part of contributing. That is interesting. This could be valuable to explore in qualitative research following individual contributors in a social situation. Recent research from Carnegie Mellon/MIT looks at the importance of the individual in collaborative environments, and it is very interesting (http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2010/October/oct1_collectiveintelligencestudy.shtml) Another student thought the most impressive part of the EDC was the design of the reflection and action spaces. Choosing to create such a design has a vast number of benefits and future improvements. The fact that the members could track the cost of their changes to the bus routes in the reflection space while changing the route in the action space was awesome. Finally, while the EDC deals directly with planning, another interesting application of this type of technology can be found used in the advertising/marketing space. A Boulder-based company, Immersive Labs, is creating new ways of collaborative touch computing interfaces for billboards. Their site is immersivelabs.com.

which features are missing from the EDC?

Two students felt it would be helpful to be able to see a moving system to understand the traffic flow, and dynamic of it rather than a static representation. This helps the understanding of why the bus is full or late. Another student said that it was slightly noted in the article, but he would have liked to see how well balanced the democratic order is when the designers and the users are selecting the EDC project. It would be nice to see if people of a different class, physically handicapped or even parents have a stronger say in what design approaches are more suited for a certain situation. Looking at the EDC though, it suffers the problem that programs like Sim City suffers in that it's not extensible or able to move to another problem set. It seems that the EDC works fine if given a set domain of a neighborhood. If the roads and city lines are well defined then adding to that picture is easy. What if the group found that a light rail is a viable option, though? Could they add a light rail route? Add bridges? Redirect roads? Also with the growing popularity of Web 2.0 it would be advantageous to add search features to the reflection space so that when they say "how much would a light rail cost" there is an answer immediately and not after they go home individually. Such breakdowns in the collaboration only set back the work done by the group in that once they've encountered a roadblock that can't be answered by the reflection space they revert back to non-experts and pretty much have nothing else to discuss. Future improvements to the reflection space need to make discovery and research further integrated while the action space would need to grow its database of objects and provide real-time modification of roads, parks, etc.