COnCEPT
Developing Intelligent Information Systems to Support Colloborative Working
Across Design Teams
Aggelos Liapis
1
, Julia Kantorovitch
2
, Julian Malins
3
, Anastasios Zafeiropoulos
1
, Mieke Haesen
4
,
Marisela Gutierrez Lopez
4
, Mathias Funk
5
, Jesus Alcantara
5
, John-Paul Moore
6
and Fiona Maciver
3
1
Intrasoft International, Markopoulou-Peania Avenue, Athens, Greece
2
VTT-Technical Research Center, Espoo, Finland
3
IDEAS Research Institute, RGU, Garthdee Road, Aberdeen, U.K.
4
Hasselt University-tUL-iMinds,Expertise Centre forDigital Media, Diepenbeek, Belgium
5
Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, Den Dolech, Netherlands
6
Atos, Albarracín, Madrid, Spain
Keywords: Business Information Systems, Collaboration, Context-Awareness, Architecture, Design Principles.
Abstract: Rapid developments in hardware and software are creating opportunities to enhance the user experience. For
example, advances in social analytics can provide near instant feedback. State of the art information
extraction tools, filtering, categorization and presentation mechanisms all greatly facilitate knowledge
exploitation activities. However, these technologies are not yet fully integrated into modern business
systems. This paper describes research being undertaken in order to develop a new collaborative creative
design platform (COnCEPT) aimed at investigating of new data-mining and collaboration technologies in
order to enhance the information systems of future businesses. This paper describes the software
architecture and the components, together with the design principles which underpin the design of the new
COnCEPT platform, which is being developed to address the needs of professional design teams working
collaboratively in a professional context.
1 INTRODUCTION
The work environments of the businesses of the
future will place greater importance on the human
dimension, making the most of workers’ knowledge,
skills and cultural backgrounds. This will require
new types of tools, applications and services with a
certain level of intelligence, including ‘context-
aware’ tools capable of supporting working
practices. These new types of context-aware tools
and applications when integrated with business
work-processes and software systems, will have the
capacity to understand what individuals are working
on, as well as the ability to support users with
domain specific information.
The volume of information existing on the web is
already too vast for humans to cope with, and is only
predicted to continue to grow exponentially in the
future. According to Gartner (2013), business data
will grow by 800% in five years, with 80% of that
being unstructured data. Content is growing not only
in volume, but also in complexity and diversity, and
this brings additional challenges. When integrated as
part of a business content management platform, the
advances in search, indexing and presentation
technology can be used to carry out the groundwork
of information processing. Domain experts such as
engineers, sales people, architects and designers can
undertake higher levels of knowledge work and
decision-making using intelligent systems.
Future business information management tools
will attempt to resemble the human ability to process
knowledge by deploying various options,
alternatives, views, and thinking patterns, assisting
knowledge workers when making critical decisions.
Taking advantage of innovative knowledge
management techniques, advances in human-
machine interaction and recent developments in
mobile cloud communication and storage
technology, new types of business applications are
expected to be able to help accomplish the
170
Liapis A., Kantorovitch J., Malins J., Zafeiropoulos A., Haesen M., Lopez M., Funk M., Alcantara J., Moore J. and Maciver F..
COnCEPT - Developing Intelligent Information Systems to Support Colloborative Working Across Design Teams.
DOI: 10.5220/0005105801700175
In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (ICSOFT-EA-2014), pages 170-175
ISBN: 978-989-758-036-9
Copyright
c
2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
complexity involved in making informed decisions.
This is due to their capabilities in analyzing and
categorizing knowledge across any and all systems,
for example, business databases, intranet, personal
archives, and web sources, hence bringing what can
be considered ‘comprehensive’ knowledge to a
particular task.
The concept of context-awareness has been the
subject of research for several decades. Progress has
been made in theories and foundations allowing the
construction of context-aware applications and
context-reasoning algorithms, with the added benefit
of increasing the accuracy and efficiency of
algorithms for extracting high and low-level context
specific data (Dey, 2001: Hong, 2009). Approaches
such as activity-based computing (Aggarwal &
Human, 2011) and advances in contextual user
interface development (Schmidt, 2012) provide a
solid foundation to consider the user experience.
However, thus far the research has focused on the
context of real physical environments and mobile
applications, where a variety of location-based
services are being applied in leisure situations. It is
evident that context-awareness is not yet part of the
workplace, and is far from becoming part of existing
business information systems.
A number of Web-based systems have been
developed for supporting collaborative activities in
the different life-cycle phases of a product’s
development. These include marketing, production,
distribution, service, etc. Distributed product
development life-cycle activities, in a globally
integrated environment, are associated with the use
of internet as well as with web technologies. Some
product development software systems have been
integrated, through web technologies, into web-
based collaboration systems (Yang et al., 2003).
Related to the web-based collaborative product
design systems are: Immersive Discussion Tool
(IDT), cPAD (Shyamsundar et al., 2002), Detailed
Virtual Design System (DVDS) (Arangarasan et al.,
2000), Virtual-based Collaborative Environment
(VRCE) (Kan et al., 2001), Web-enabled Product
Data Management (PDM) (Xu et al., 2003).
Moreover, various commercial tools and open
source software applications and platforms, such as
the IBM- and Google-branded products, eDrawings
Professional, Matrix10, and others are also available
(Wiki, 2014). However, the global market still lacks
in collaboration tools, focussed in serving the
conceptual/creative stages and decision making
techniques of the design process capable of
providing both knowledge management and decision
making techniques with the possibility of product
design evaluation. Most collaborative tools are
related more to a project- and to a PLM-
management and less to shared creative product
design environments.
In recent years, with progress in personal mobile
technology, social network applications and the
proliferation of choice in the smart gadget consumer
market, many are wondering why their work
technology experience is not as advanced as their
personal home-based systems. According to the
Capgemini report (2013), employees in 2014 have
higher expectations of workspace technology than
ever before. Today, many business content and
knowledge management systems are often
standalone tools with unattractive user interfaces -
altogether different to those used in personal
settings. There is a good level of automation
possible for the handling of business processes using
software systems to facilitate CRM and ERP tasks.
However, in most cases, they are used for reporting
and statistics purposes than for example, for helping
to analyze customer needs, and in designing an offer
that would match customer needs in the most
appropriate way, and for facilitating the individual
or whilst working collaboratively with others.
There are several important issues that first need
to be resolved before developing a platform which
addresses the end-user’s requirements. Additional
research and development is required to address the
following issues:
Intelligent knowledge management tools that
are able to index, categorize, and present
relevant knowledge to domain experts or
novices, based on their existing expertise.
Efficient collaboration tools supporting both
face-to-face and remote interactions, as well as
synchronous and asynchronous interactions in
contextual knowledge flows.
Contextual awareness in the seamless linking
of business knowledge and content
management systems with web resources.
Adaptable human computer interfaces that are
able to provide an intuitive user experience
based on familiar metaphors and concepts.
The approach adopted by the COnCEPT project
seeks to address the challenges faced by businesses
in the future by introducing a knowledge-centred,
personalised service platform to support individual
product designers when collaborating in the initial
stages of ideation and product conceptualization.
In the following section, the platform’s
architecture and its main building components,
services, and tools are presented. The aim is to
capture a common pattern, and therein to facilitate
COnCEPT-DevelopingIntelligentInformationSystemstoSupportColloborativeWorkingAcrossDesignTeams
171
innovation in the early stages of product design. The
following section describes some of the principles
that underpin a platform designed to support
professional design teams working in collaboration
with other stakeholders. Section 3, sets out the
design methodology used to approach the service
design for a context-aware collaboration work
process and conclusions are presented in Section 4.
2 THE COnCEPT FRAMEWORK
The COnCEPT platform aims to respond to a variety
of use case scenarios derived from both business and
educational contexts.
The design of the platform needs to closely
reflect the real world to be found when designers are
asked to respond to a complex design brief. The
underlying principles that determine successful
design solutions have to be understood in order to be
able to develop appropriate software architecture
and interfaces capable of supporting the design
process. These principles include the need to support
generative divergent thinking, which is particularly
important at the early stages of the design process,
followed by mechanisms that support convergent
thinking and evaluation of ideas. The project has
used ethnographic research methods to identify the
needs of professional product designers and to
identify particular opportunities for supporting the
design process. Adding to the complexity of the
COnCEPT platform is the need to support
collaborative working, which has become more
important in recent years as design teams become
increasingly geographically and temporally
distributed. Understanding the ways in which
individuals work collaboratively, establish trust and
protocols, has direct implications for the design of
the software architecture and its interfaces. It is
critical to understand how information is handled by
designers working in a professional context. For
example how designers make use of images for
inspiration, to explain ideas through metaphor and
analogy and when visualising concepts.
The work of product designers will be supported
by several means; centrally the collection of project
related information from different sources, for
example, web-based and locally stored sources of
information, previous experience, and associated
market research. The information will be available
for quick access by any member of the project team,
presented visually with possibilities for
rearrangement and filtering. This is intended to
support collective creativity and ideation. To support
the features discussed above, the high-level
components of the COnCEPT framework have been
defined, along with the relationships between them.
This is shown in Fig. 1. The defined COnCEPT
architectural components aim to support all phases
of the initial design process including: 1) the
initiation and management of new and existing
projects, 2) the brief analysis and brainstorming, 3)
the collection of relevant material in a mood-board,
4) the design of a set of concepts in a storyboard
which synthesizes the existing material and tools for
evaluating and selecting the most promising solution
for development, 5) sketching and visualising, 6) the
presentation of proposed concept(s) to clients, and 7)
tools allowing the review of the development of the
project.
In order to support the required functionalities in
each of the above-mentioned phases, use of a
Content Management System (CMS) is considered
necessary as the main platform, upon which the
development and interconnection of individual
components can be realised. CMS modules also
allow for the interlinking of the proposed tools with
existing business systems. A number of the
components will be based on the customization and
extension of existing CMS plugins, whilst other
elements will be based on the integration of external
open source tools in the platform. A number of
mature open source CMS platforms, such as
WordPress, Drupal, and Liferay have been evaluated
as possible solutions for implementing the functions
envisaged for the COnCEPT platform.
To facilitate the process of knowledge
exploration by domain experts, the availability of a
large volume of annotated resources is essential.
Annotations with well-defined semantics are
required to ensure the interoperability of available
information for supporting knowledge sharing and
collaboration across design teams and stakeholders.
Annotation mechanisms for creating or re-use of
content, for example text photographs and sketches
will be supported within the collaborative tools,
whilst information storage and retrieval is realised
based on the interconnection of components with the
COnCEPT database.
Semantic technologies will be exploited to assist
the accurate modelling of the information provided.
The relevant ontologies and Open Linked Data (LD)
vocabularies will ensure the accuracy of the
proposed annotations. By explicitly describing the
relationships between multimedia resources, visual
content and other support material and using Open
LD datasets, the digital content from internal
business repositories can be linked to each other.
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Other useful knowledge data and cross-application
domain’s visual resources and aids on the web, can
also be linked.
Figure 1: The COnCEPT platform framework.
In addition to the core components of the
COnCEPT architecture, a set of functionalities will
be incorporated such as activities logging, roles and
policies definition and management, online voting,
cost model description and progress evaluation
reports creation. Finally, a project management and
social media framework will be implemented and
integrated into the COnCEPT platform allowing for
management of the projects by the participants. In
addition it will also allow for the sharing of
information with the client or social networks
following the successful completion of crucial
milestones within the design process.
3 DESIGN FOR
COLLABORATION
Given the social nature of collaborative design, the
project has approached the design activities of
COnCEPT services by adopting an approach based
on the conceptual framework Activity-based Theory
(AT) (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 1997). This approach
allows us to frame human activity in relation to the
people, activities, objects, tools and community
involved. AT is specifically applicable to the
COnCEPT platform as it analyses how tools mediate
human activity and how these tools can be situated
in a socio-cultural setting. User-Centred Design
(UCD) research methods are being used to reveal the
ways in which designers are working and to identify
some of the opportunities for assisting the design
process. For example keeping track of the
development of the project when multiple parties are
involved. This involves talking directly to
professional designers and visiting their studios and
making direct observations in order to record how
they tackle new projects and collaborate with
colleagues. In this section we introduce five design
guidelines to promote collaboration, which has
informed the design of the COnCEPT platform.
3.1 Support for Personalisation
Design activities, as much as any other human
activity, evolve constantly. COnCEPT should
therefore allow its users to re-define and change
their activities during the course of their work
(Houben et al., 2013). Where customization takes
into account the context of use, personalisation goes
a step further by offering the ability of an interactive
application capable of being adapted to suit personal
preferences. Personalisation is essential to maximize
usability for business information systems (Nielsen,
2011). In an integrated collaborative environment as
targeted by COnCEPT, personalisation is envisioned
on two levels. On one level, the collaborators will be
able to use the appropriate tools depending on their
expertise and design practices. On another level,
personalisation will enable users to work more
efficiently due to the adapted settings and
parameters of these tools.
3.2 Integrating Collaborative Tools
The use of diverse standalone tools creates a context
switch, which has been identified as a source of
interruptions and project fragmentation, since most
tools are disconnected from each other to perform
similar or related activities (Houben et al., 2013).
The COnCEPT platform aims to support both
individual and team workflows, integrating tools
based on these workflows in order to support more
fluent collaboration. COnCEPT will constitute an
activity-oriented workspace, where design activities
are clearly integrated through the user interface
(Houben et al., 2013) to support conceptual design
activities in different individual and collaborative
work settings.
3.3 Supporting Transparency and
Context-Awareness
Since design activities are not limited to a single
context of use, in that they can be face-to-face, or in
different times and locations, COnCEPT should
ensure context-awareness among various devices
and physical locations to accurately represent human
COnCEPT-DevelopingIntelligentInformationSystemstoSupportColloborativeWorkingAcrossDesignTeams
173
activities. For example, sharing activities should not
only be possible amongst users but also devices, and
in consideration of these different contexts. This will
be integrated in the COnCEPT platform making use
of cloud storage functionalities in which files are
transparently stored and made available online and
on-demand instead of being located on a local
server.
3.4 Design as a Social Process
Design activities are often interdisciplinary
activities, and involve collaboration amongst
customers, designers and technical specialists.
Therefore, COnCEPT users should be able to know
who is participating in the design process, and
coordinate different activities in regards to these
other participants. After determining the role of each
discipline in the conceptual design phase, the
COnCEPT platform will define an interaction
protocol and devise a set of effective communication
methods that aid the awareness and coordination of
collaborative design activities.
In distributed collaboration, human-computer
interaction must be closely coupled with human-
human interaction and both types of interaction
should not interfere with each other. Alternatively,
the computer should discretely support, facilitate and
enhance the human element of the process. The
COnCEPT platform will investigate which
interaction techniques are most suited for specific
situations and activities for example individual
versus collaborative activities, and how they can be
combined into an integrated experience.
3.5 Supporting Awareness and
Reflection
The approach adopted by COnCEPT, is to facilitate
successful bonding and coordination between the
team members through sharing information that
helps individuals orient themselves to the stimuli
provided and experienced by other team members
(Shteynberg and Galinsky, 2011). This can be
related to general attribution, i.e., according to the
work of DeShon et al. (2004, p. 1037) “team-level
constructs have their origins in individual cognition
and behaviour and emerge as team members work
together over time, in an interactive-task context”.
Facilitating feedback, and feed-forward,
mechanisms as providers of information about the
perception of other team members, can inspire self-
reflection, as well as lead to implicit coordination of
the whole team. This can be achieved by providing
different perspectives on the design work in-
progress, such as time-based, task-based, person-
based, or activity-based views. Such perspectives
contribute to a better understanding of the entire
collaboration project, in that they might reveal links
and hidden work patterns. Regularly changing
perspectives can help designers and design
stakeholders focus on the most relevant aspects of
the collaboration and also may help to avoid
motivational dips and conceptual cul-de-sacs. Self-
reflection is considered to be useful in creativity
when solving uncertain and undetermined problems
(Schön, 1983), since it triggers divergent thinking,
which is essential for identifying and properly
representing the problem into list of actions to
follow. Moreover, distributed design teams benefit
from functional, inherent, and augmented
information, which also provides coherent
interactions between team members (Wensveen, et
al., 2004).
Further research is needed on how to structure,
collect, select, and present insightful information
that triggers self-reflection at individual and team
levels, and which supports the collaborative process
as a whole. Considering that the backbone of
intelligence is contextual knowledge, the boundary
of knowledge management generalization is still yet
to be identified that works for the individual, and
which can be extended to other business domains.
4 CONCLUSIONS
The rapidly developing space of novel technologies
that combine advances in knowledge management,
context awareness and human machine interfaces
may provide many new opportunities to facilitate the
information exploitation needs of future business
systems. This paper has presented the semantically
driven user-centred COnCEPT approach, which is a
step towards seamlessly integrating product
development processes into a comprehensive
context-aware collaborative design environment.
The COnCEPT platform aims to mirror the
professional design context and at the same time
provide new and innovative tools to support the
early stages of the design process by providing
context-specific information and by supporting
team- based collaboration.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research is funded by the European
Commission 7th Framework ICT Research
Programme. Further details can be found accessed
at: http://www.concept-fp7.eu
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