OpenDesign: Analyzing Deliberation and Rationale in an Exploratory

Case Study

Fabr

ıcio Matheus Gonc¸alves

, Alysson Prado

and Maria Cec

ılia Calani Baranauskas

Institute of Computing, University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

Keywords:

Open Phenomena, Open Design, Open Source, Deliberation, Design Rationale, Organizational Semiotics,

Actor Network Theory.

Abstract:

The open phenomenon coming from the free-software movement has gained several ﬁelds, including services,

digital and physical products. Nevertheless, some authors point out the limited availability of supporting

methods and online tools to face the challenges of distributed collaboration of volunteers. They claim that

online collaborative platforms are still needed for supporting co-creation. In this paper, we investigate the

deliberation and design rationale in an (open) design process using the OpenDesign Platform. A case study

conducted with 22 participants of a Conference illustrates the use of the platform to cope with a proposed

design challenge. Results illustrated with graphical representations based on concepts of the Actor Network

Theory provide a visual representation of the network constituted by both the participants and the artifacts

(boundary objects) they produce and interpret. Further studies are pointed out suggesting new possibilities of

features and platform enhancements.

1 INTRODUCTION

The open phenomenon to systems design comes from

the free-software movement and got spread over sev-

eral ﬁelds including the open data, open science, open

governance, to name a few. Its origin goes back to

the 1970 decade, with the political movement that

occurred in reaction to the proprietarization of soft-

ware source code, chaired by Stallman through the

‘GNU Project’ (Stallman, 1985). The open-source

software, as deﬁned by Warger (2002), p.18 “an ap-

proach to software development and intellectual prop-

erty in which program code is available to all partic-

ipants and can be modiﬁed by any of them”, focuses

on the process of software code development and in-

tellectual property. Since then, the open concept has

been widened to reach other domains, including the

broad cycle of product design (Boisseau et al., 2018).

Open design, in its broader sense, has been

pointed out as promising and disruptive, although ac-

knowledged as a phenomenon that has been yet little

studied by the scientiﬁc community (Boisseau et al.,

2018). One of the main reasons for this effort seems

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1479-947X

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5804-950X

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4830-5298

to be the democratization of design; design here re-

ferring to physical as well as digital products, and

services. The motivations of stakeholders to get in-

volved in open initiatives range from ideological to

the direct and indirect beneﬁts perceived by partic-

ipants. In this sense the open phenomenon shares

some principles and can learn from Participatory De-

sign (PD) practices and related issues (Schuler and

Namioka, 1993). An example of this match is the

user’s role bringing his/her expertise to the design

process, going beyond the object-for-money trade re-

lation to other forms of contributions in the process

and product of design. The tradition of participa-

tory design is to ensure that end users are involved

in the design process bringing the tacit and contex-

tual knowledge to help shape design toward the most

meaningful solution (Schuler and Namioka, 1993).

However, changes in information and communication

technology, consumer culture, communities of inter-

est, manufacturing processes, economies and global

markets have brought new opportunities to extend this

tradition (Battarbee et al., 2008). As stated by Frauen-

berger et al. (2018), PD practices must be extended to

increase the democratization of technology design, al-

lowing a broader range of stakeholders to participate

in the design process. Frauenberger et al. (2018) pro-

pose to understand this movement through strategies

Gonçalves, F., Prado, A. and Baranauskas, M.

OpenDesign: Analyzing Deliberation and Rationale in an Exploratory Case Study.

DOI: 10.5220/0009385305110522

In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2020) - Volume 2, pages 511-522

ISBN: 978-989-758-423-7

511

such as scale and dialectics. Scale asks for ways to ex-

tend PD reach without giving up on its core qualities.

Dialectics is about creating and maintaining spaces

for constructive conﬂict by networking and linking

with other stakeholders, organizations and domains.

These demands pose difﬁculties and challenges for

PD practitioners and researchers to conduct practices

synchronously and in a same geographical place.

Achieving larger scale and improved dialectic re-

quires tools which, on the one hand, afford creative

and collaborative behavior, fostering participation of

anyone who feels affected by the proposed construct.

On the other hand, such tools should avoid excessive

or inadequate actions, such as having the voice mo-

nopolized by someone. Moreover, access for anyone

to join the discussion at any point of time must be as-

sured. Online Deliberation - OD - tools address the is-

sues related to online discussion process, helping par-

ticipants to clarify a subject, by separating pros and

cons arguments and opinions from each participant

(Kriplean et al., 2012), equalizing biases and promot-

ing awareness of points of view.

The Socially Aware Computing – SAwC – de-

sign model (Baranauskas et al., 2014) is a theoretical

and methodological framework rooted on Participa-

tory Design (Schuler and Namioka, 1993), Universal

Design (Stephanidis et al., 2001) and Organizational

Semiotics (Liu and Li, 2014) approaches. Its goal

is to allow a collective construction of meaning, en-

compassing the diverse point of views from people

involved and affected by the design of an information

system or a digital artifact. The convergence of opin-

ions and objectives occurs through a series of the so-

called Semio-Participatory workshops, in-place activ-

ities conducted in face-to-face meetings where discus-

sion and expression of all interested parties are pro-

moted and mediated.

The OpenDesign project [ref] is inspired by the

Open Source philosophy, since this has provided a

number of high quality software products, gathering

and coordinating efforts from people with different

skills and from different places. The project’s objec-

tive is to formalize a community-driven design pro-

cess for interactive system design, and provide tools

for its accomplishment. In the context of this project,

a web platform was developed, intended to enable the

Semio-Participatory workshops from SAwC to be car-

ried out in an asynchronous and distributed scenario.

In this paper, we investigate the importance of de-

liberation and design rationale in the (open) design

process presenting a case study conducted among par-

ticipants of a Conference Summer School (Informat-

ics Research Centre, Henley Business School, Uni-

versity of Reading, UK, 2019) using the OpenDesign

Platform tools. On the scale aspect, once it is not

effective or even feasible to participate in all discus-

sions, the platform provides frames to gather organic

interests subgroups formation around an issue or idea

proposal and their interconnections. To handle dialec-

tics we provide a frame structure that affords cap-

turing beneﬁts and drawbacks of each proposal and

also by mediating discussion into semi-structured ar-

gumentation to collaboratively elicit which pros and

cons resonates more around an idea or issue.

The paper is organized as follows: In the next sec-

tion we present the background and related work con-

text. Then, we present an overview of our proposal

for the OpenDesign Platform and its boundary ob-

jects. A case study on the Platform Usage follows,

with discussion on the main results. The ﬁnal section

concludes pointing out further work.

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED

WORK

Bonvoisin et al. (2015) argue that the spread of ICT

and cheap low-size production tools like 3D-printers

led to the community-based and open source devel-

opment of physical products. This innovative orga-

nization of product development (open design) of-

fers a great opportunity for continuous improvement

of products as well as a potential for product inno-

vation and in consequence incubation of new busi-

nesses. The authors also point out the limited avail-

ability of supporting methods and online tools for

helping to face the organizational challenges raised

by distributed collaboration of non-experts, non-

professional and non-contractually engaged volun-

teers. They claim that online collaborative platforms

are still needed with special features to build and keep

the community active, providing mechanisms for the

convergence of the design process, for knowledge

management, and for supporting co-creation. Those

features would be essential to the rise of open design.

In the tradition of PD, some efforts have been con-

ducted with social technologies to increase people’s

participation regarding information production, pub-

lication, and sharing (Hagen and Robertson, 2010).

Hargreaves and Robertson (2012) propose the use of

social technologies (Skype video calls, screen sharing

and email) to allow discussions between researchers

and participants who are remotely located, and pro-

totyping activities to occur at a distance. The in-

teraction among participants is structured in regular

cycles of reﬂective discussion and prototype modiﬁ-

cation. While social technologies are participatory

by their nature as they require and depend on peo-

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512

ple’s involvement to take shape, they also have draw-

backs. For instance, regarding power, it is not clear

who exactly beneﬁts from people’s participation, how

to value participation without exploitation. Problems

with privacy, ownership, deletion and sharing of per-

sonal information might be some issues raised when

developing participatory systems. Bringing a partici-

patory approach to the design of such systems is criti-

cal to ensure that people have the ability to negotiate,

control and understand the implications of participa-

tion as they evolve (Greenbaum, 1993).

The OpenDesign Platform, we are addressing in

this work, can be seen as a purposeful social technol-

ogy, where participants voluntarily interact towards a

shared design goal, starting from the early stages of

clarifying a design problem, by identifying the inter-

ested parties, and anticipating their potential issues re-

garding a prospective design solution. By ‘open’ we

mean a design process that allows contribution of the

volunteers to the product design since its conception

(not only in a prototyping stage).

In a study on the open design state of the art re-

view, Boisseau et al. (2018) illustrate that the sub-

ject of open design of products started in the early

2000s and is still a growing phenomenon. They have

shown that the limited number of published papers

suggests the concept has not spread over traditional

design communities yet, still being restricted to a few

research groups. Drawing on the design science ap-

proach, they argue that the subject that designers have

to address is to provide a plan based on a gap (a de-

sign problem), through the development of a solution.

Three elements are proposed to describe the product

design process: a) the phases and activities that con-

stitute the process, b) the boundary objects that consti-

tute the information formalized and carried from one

phase to the next one, and c) the participants (or stake-

holders) taking part in activities of the design process.

We should notice that the boundary objects are used

for sharing a common understanding of the solution

being constructed among the participants and that the

plan is the ﬁnal boundary object.

Several attempts have already been made to pro-

vide a distributed platform for online collaborative de-

sign. Most of them focus on the support for sharing

the artifact being built - a prototype or a mock-up, for

instance. Heintz et al. (2014) searched for tools to

support such tasks, and analyzed six applications:

• GABBEH (Naghsh and Andy, 2004) mimics pa-

per prototyping by enabling users to comment on

the current design by drawing with a software

tool, but its technical requirements made it too re-

stricted.

• DisCo (Walsh et al., 2012) supports distributed

PD sessions, but was not publicly available for use

at the time of the study.

• Appotate (appotate.com) brings together different

stakeholders, allowing them to give feedback on a

prototype.

• MarkUp (markup.io) allows the user to draw and

write on a website; however, it does not offer a

structured way to store and retrieve this feedback.

• MyBalsamiq (mybalsamiq.com) mock-up soft-

ware offers a wide range of common interface el-

ements to create feedback on prototypes.

• Webklipper (webklipper.com) is an online appli-

cation that enables the user to annotate websites

and share the results.

Most of the mentioned tools mimics paper prototyp-

ing and enable users to comment on the current de-

sign. They also propose a tool that, beyond the al-

ready found features, provides a like/dislike heatmap

and enhanced interactivity.

Fischer (2004) studied design communities and

identiﬁed types of common barriers they must cope in

order to work together: spatial (across distance), tem-

poral (across time), conceptual (across different com-

munities of practice), and technological (between per-

sons and artifacts). For spatial barriers, it is straight-

forward to propose the use of computer-mediated

communication as a solution. On the temporal do-

main, he stresses that “long-term collaboration re-

quires that present-day designers be aware of the ra-

tionale behind decisions that shaped the artifact, and

aware of information about possible alternatives that

were considered but not implemented” (Heintz et al.,

2014, p. 155). Conceptual barriers must be overcome

by humans serving as knowledge brokers and by inte-

grating diversity, making all voices to be heard.

ogvinsson et al. (2012) discussed that a funda-

mental challenge for designers and the design com-

munity is a change of focus from designing objects to

designing socio-material assemblies, which encom-

pass heterogeneity of perspectives among actors who

engage in attempts to align their conﬂicting objects

of design. In their proposal, the role of non-human

participants in the design process, such as prototypes,

mock-ups, models, and diagrams is to act as “pre-

senters” of the evolving object of design, support-

ing communication and participation in the design

process, potentially binding different participants to-

gether.

We agree with Bonvoisin et al. (2015) in acknowl-

edging the concept of open design as a signiﬁcant

phenomenon, supported by trends in contemporary

digital technology and organization, which faces sig-

niﬁcant challenges of interest for several scientiﬁc

OpenDesign: Analyzing Deliberation and Rationale in an Exploratory Case Study

513

disciplines. For example, they cite (p. 3): understand-

ing the dynamics of online communities, developing

motivation models for contributors, identifying busi-

ness models that allow to create sustainable economic

value with open source products, understanding the

decision processes in horizontal work organizations,

clarifying legal issues of intellectual property, iden-

tifying ways to ensure and validate product quality,

liability and safety, among others.

As for the open design of products proposed by

Boisseau et al. (2018) in the three elements that con-

stitute it (the gap, the process itself, and the plan), the

authors state that the gap is contingent, and the actors

of the design process have no inﬂuence on it. In our

approach, the design problem addressed (the gap for

Boisseau and colleagues), is open too, as it is open

to the interpretation and clariﬁcation by the interested

parties, as part of the design process. Although our

concept of design may reach the plan (i.e. for ex-

ample, the drawings of a design product), differently

from these authors, we are not limiting the object of

design to a (material) ‘product’ of industrial design.

In our work, we associate to ‘design’ the activities

that precede the code production in a digital infor-

mation system design, encompassing problem discus-

sion, deliberation and clariﬁcation, ideation of solu-

tions, requirements elicitation, design rationale. The

next section provides an overview of our proposal for

the OpenDesign Platform and its boundary objects.

3 AN OVERVIEW OF

DELIBERATION/RATIONALE

PROPOSAL IN THE

OPENDESIGN PLATFORM

In this section we present the OpenDesign Platform

based on: a) the phases and activities that constitute

the process (SAwC), b) the boundary objects that con-

stitute the information formalized (the artefacts), and

c) the participants (or stakeholders) taking part in ac-

tivities of the design process.

The Socially Aware Computing model has in-

spired the process which we have incorporated into

the OpenDesign Platform. Traditionally, this model

is inspired by some Organizational Semiotics arte-

facts and consists of three phases, each guided by one

speciﬁc artifact. The ﬁrst phase is the elicitation of

stakeholders, which is made using the artifact known

as Stakeholders Identiﬁcation Diagram (SID) adapted

from Kolkman (1993). This artifact allows us to in-

dicate all those who will affect or be affected by the

product of the design, which can be categories of in-

dividuals (like developers, designers, etc.), or entities

(such as universities or corporations). SID’s graph-

ical representation usually has ﬁve sequential layers

that contain each other, like an onion, as we can see

in Figure 1. The idea is that the innermost layers con-

tain stakeholders that are more directly involved with

the design product. During this phase of the SAwC

process, participants discuss who they believe affects

or is affected by the designed solution, and to which

layer each stakeholder belongs. After ideas of sev-

eral possible stakeholders are placed into the artifact,

a deliberation can be conducted on whether or not the

identiﬁed stakeholders are correctly named, catego-

rized or even if they actually should be there.

Figure 1: Stakeholder Identiﬁcation Diagram.

The next phase is guided by the Evaluation Frame

(EF), a table-like artifact that supports the rea-

soning of problems and solutions associated with

each stakeholder identiﬁed in the SID adapted from

Baranauskas et al. (2005). Usually, it contains one

column for raising issues, and another column for so-

lutions or ideas associated to the issues. Then, each

row represents one layer of the SID. On the Open-

Design platform, such format was slightly adapted to

allow users to navigate through the layers from a left-

side menu, as we can see in Figure 2. In addition,

the deliberation aspect of this stage is reinforced by

allowing users to like or dislike entries, and to add

comments justifying their votes. Hence, the platform

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provides a deliberation frame (Figure 3), where par-

ticipants can raise pros and cons about a solution that

was placed on the EF, or they can add neutral com-

ments. The main idea, then, is to provide a way to

document the deliberation process.

Figure 2: Evaluation Frame.

Figure 3: Deliberation Frame.

Finally, the third stage is guided by the Semi-

otic Framework (SF) artifact adapted from Stam-

per (1973), which provides six levels of knowledge,

stacked on top of each other in a progressive manner,

similar to a ladder, as we can see in Figure 4. The bot-

tom three levels are related to the structure of signs,

how they are organized and transmitted. In turn, the

upper three levels are related to how signs are used, in

terms of meanings, intentions, and social impact they

have. Therefore, the SF can be a useful instrument

for identifying and organizing the requirements of the

design product.

Together these three artifacts provide criteria to

promote the process of deliberation and rationale,

where participants are engaged in discussing partic-

ular aspects of the design, which they might not

think of without the artifacts. Furthermore, the plat-

Figure 4: Semiotic Framework.

form instantiates these artifacts in a way that encour-

ages and documents deliberation and rationale. For

instance, beside designers, apprentices and domain

knowledge’s holders taking part in a given OpenDe-

sign session, the participants are prompted to remem-

ber and represent the concerns and hopes of absent

stakeholders. This remembering is facilitated by the

SID boundary object that frames 5 distinct levels of

involvement with the system, from daily operational-

ization to the distant community with spectators and

legislators. The platform aims to give direct voice to

some of these more distant stakeholders to directly

participate in design and feedback about a design

product, instead of being only represented.

The OpenDesign platform can be used following

certain steps. First, a challenge is proposed by one or

more key participants, representing each local group

of users. Not all local groups participants are neces-

sarily operating the platform online, nevertheless they

participate in local discussions and may contribute to

OpenDesign: Analyzing Deliberation and Rationale in an Exploratory Case Study

515

the solutions and proposals. Besides, a video confer-

ence can create another communication channel, sup-

porting all the activities, but mainly the selection of

an issue from the EF to be worked out in the SF to-

wards the design solutions. This dynamics is depicted

in Figure 5.

(A)

(B)

(C)

(D)

Figure 5: Open Design Semiotic Workshop dynamics: A)

a challenge is proposed for key participants in each local

group and then the SID is populated with related Stakehold-

ers; B) evaluation frame and deliberation are carried out; C)

based on the artifacts available at the platform, issues are

discussed and a focal idea of solution is selected for the

next phase; D) semiotic framework is generated, giving rise

to the proposal of solutions and requirements.

4 A CASE STUDY ON THE

PLATFORM USAGE

4.1 Context and Participants

To evaluate the proposed platform we conducted a

case study in the context of a Summer School in

the Organizational Semiotics Conference (Informat-

ics Research Centre, Henley Business School, Uni-

versity of Reading, UK, 2019). The case study took

place as a 3h15’ hands on activity, co-located in two

research centers in two countries (UK and Brazil).

Two conference rooms (9 and 12 participants, respec-

tively) connected also by videoconference, and one

more participant connected from home. The partic-

ipants goal was to learn and practice socially aware

design, instantiated in a pre-given common problem

ampliﬁed by technology pervasiveness without cor-

responding human development and training - the

fake news global challenge. Participants of diverse

countries and languages, with backgrounds mostly on

business and computer science, worked in the same

problem, sharing ideas along the hands on activities,

through the OpenDesign Platform.

To the proposed ‘problem’ (the fake news global

challenge), the platform was previously loaded with

24 stakeholders, 13 issues and 7 proposals of so-

lutions, ﬁlled by 9 volunteers (5 co-located and 4

digitally-located) in a 1 hour warmup, one week be-

fore the event.

The use of the collaborative platform was orga-

nized into phases: clarifying the problem, raising the

main interested parties, raising issues the interested

parties might have, proposing ideas of design solu-

tions for facing the issues, discussing and selecting

one potential solution to carry on, and organizing re-

quirements for the selected solution idea. At the end,

participants were invited to express their opinion on

the experience with the Platform. Table 1 illustrates

the Agenda of activities carried out in the 3h15’ hands

on meeting.

Table 2 synthesizes the participants’ main contri-

butions using the platform before (warmup) and dur-

ing the workshop. Some participated (6) in both mo-

ments, while in the workshop some participants did

not interact through the platform (4), although they

exchanged ideas with collocated colleagues. The de-

liberation (arguments) and SF ﬁlling (requirements)

was performed only during the workshop.

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Table 1: Agenda for the Hands on Meeting.

Boundary

Objects

Time

spent Activity Description

Videoconference 20 Greetings; platform

overview and challenge

presentation

Stakeholder

Identiﬁcation

Diagram

20 Making sense of

previews entries and

raising new Stakeholders

Evaluation

Frame 1

35 Raising most issues and

arguments

Evaluation

Frame 2

30 Creating solution

proposals and arguments

Semiotic

Framework 1

10 Discussing and selecting

ideas from the EF to SF

30 Coffee-Break

Semiotic

Framework 1

15 Discussing and selecting

idea of solution from EF

to SF

Semiotic

Framework 2

25 Filling the SF with

requirements

Videoconference 10 Wrap-up and invitation

for the Evaluation

Questionnaire

Table 2: Participants and information they formalized

into the platform.

Warmup Workshop Total

Participants 9 22 25 (6 in

both)

Active in

Platform

9 18 24 (3 in

both)

Duration 1h 2h45min 3h45min

Stakeholders 24 26 50

Issues 13 12 25

Solution

Proposal

7 13 20

Arguments – 61 61

Requirements – 23 23

4.2 Data Analysis

Social networks are not just made up of persons, they

consist of people who are connected by the so-called

social objects (Engestr

om, 2005), which we are un-

derstanding as content in boundary objects. From

this perspective, Engestr

om (2005) argues that what

causes the failure of many social networking sites is

the lack of shared objects acting as hubs for people’s

interaction (Avram, 2005).

In order to understand the interplay between peo-

ple and non-human entities in a social scenario, the

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) proposes to study so-

cial phenomena as heterogeneous networks where

both human and non-human can contribute (Latour,

2005). This approach allows one to acknowledge

the mediation role of objects that propagate human

intentions. Such heterogeneous social networks can

provide a visual representation of both the partici-

pants and the artifacts they produce and interpret. For

instance, scientiﬁc social networks are mediated by

publications, and by analyzing both entities together

we can highlight structures of scientiﬁc communities

(Prado and Baranauskas, 2016).

In our study, this approach is employed to illus-

trate the interactions between participants and the di-

verse artifacts (boundary objects) used in the Semi-

otic Workshops. Whenever a participant creates or

edits a stakeholder on the Stakeholder Identiﬁcation

Diagram, an issue on the Evaluation Frame, or a re-

quirement in the Semiotic Framework, a bond is es-

tablished between them. Moreover, issues of the EF

related to each stakeholder are also linked together.

Social relations between participants arise also when

a participant makes an argument on the issues created

by another person. These structures allow us to eval-

uate the interactions afforded by the platform. For

instance, the presence of cliques (short loop with a

single participant) or many disconnected vertices may

indicate a poor discussion, leading to less representa-

tive design proposals. Conversely, a richer discussion

can emerge from associations with no single hubs, nor

disconnected sub-groups.

The visual representation of these social interac-

tions and the mediating artifacts are represented in

Figure 6 through the QUID tool [ref]: participants

are depicted as red circles, stakeholders from SID as

blue circles, issues and solutions pointed out in EF as

blue squares and Semiotic Framework items as white

circles. For the arguments, drawn in green, triangles

mean positive, diamonds mean neutral, and crosses

mean negative.

Figure 6: Visual representation for the network of interac-

tions between people and types of artifacts created on the

platform.

OpenDesign: Analyzing Deliberation and Rationale in an Exploratory Case Study

517

After the hands on activity, the participants were in-

vited to give feedback about their experience with the

platform through an online questionnaire to under-

stand the platform’s boundary objects capacity to pro-

mote deliberation, rationale and awareness, from the

point of view of participants.

4.3 Results and Discussion

From the interaction logs collected by the platform

and processed by the QUID tool, it was possible to

visually represent who contributed and, from the so-

cial objects perspective presented earlier, how their

work build up to the workshop outcomes. Figure 7

shows the main artifacts with which the participants

interacted, and the paths of interactions they create,

prior to the deliberation phase.

Figure 7: Complete graph of relations between participants

(red circles, randomly numbered and labeled as Pnn to

anonymize participants), stakeholders they raised or edited

(blue circles), problems and solutions pointed out (blue

squares) and Semiotic Framework items (white circles).

The main feature of this graph of relations is the

presence of a major connected component compris-

ing most of the vertices, depicting the variety of in-

teractions provided by the platform. Except for P14,

P19, and P20, all other participants engaged in in-

teractions with the content created by others, creat-

ing paths of associations linking most of participants.

This suggests a successful sharing of ideas and con-

cepts among users. Although many participants in-

teracted with their own content - for instance, adding

a problem to a stakeholder proposed by themselves,

creating the “triangles” on the graph - they also con-

tributed to others’ contents. Also noticeable is the

lack of correlation between the physical location of

users during the workshops and their placement on

the graph; for instance, although P03 and P16 were

on different places, they are closely attached on the

graph, as they constructed collaboratively some con-

tent, along with P04 and P06.

Figure 8 shows a detail of the complete graph, for

the sake of a better understanding of what is being

represented. The participant P04 raised the “Public

Figures” stakeholder in the Stakeholder Identiﬁcation

Diagram; afterwards, participants P21, P03 and P01

edited it, complementing or clarifying its description.

In the next activity, through the Evaluation Frame,

P04 attached the issue “Negative impact on the per-

son’s life” to the shared stakeholder.

Figure 8: Detail of the graph of relations, focusing on an

identiﬁed stakeholder and the other entities related to it.

Regarding the deliberation phase, Figure 9 brings a

view on how each argument is related to the issues and

solutions raised in the Evaluation Frame, and to their

authors as well. Node sizes are proportional to the

number of arguments attached to it, revealing the most

active authors and, according to their interaction, the

most interesting subjects.

It is noticeable that most commented problems

and solutions were not proposed by the most eloquent

users, suggesting different proﬁles of participation,

and showing that the tool provided a balanced discus-

sion environment. Authors also did not try to overem-

phasize solely the positive aspects of their proposals.

The graph including the requirements in the Semi-

otic Framework (white circles) highlights the interac-

tion of the participant P17 who contributed with the

main idea (“May the blockchain tech help”) for the

ﬁnal phase. This participant registered only this pro-

posal, after engaging in deliberation with other 5 is-

sues and ideas proposed by 4 other participants with

3 positive and 2 neutral arguments Figure 10. This

same behavior is shared by other participants (P16,

P09, P15, P13) while other participants were more

engaged in deliberation (P22, P21, P23, P12) and oth-

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Figure 9: Relationship between authors (red circles), problems and solutions (blue squares) and arguments (green shapes).

Positive arguments are depicted as triangles, neutral ones as diamonds, and negative arguments as crosses. The vertices with

greater number of arguments are labeled.

Figure 10: Complete graph of interactions after the Semiotic Framework and Deliberation phases were carried out. In bold,

highlight of the interaction of the participant who contributed to the idea selected as the focal point in the SF.

OpenDesign: Analyzing Deliberation and Rationale in an Exploratory Case Study

519

ers contributed more to SF but not in the deliberation

(P19, P8).

4.3.1 Getting Feedback through the

Questionnaire

Regarding the platform usage evaluation, after the ac-

tivities carried out through the platform, an invitation

was made only for those in one of the two groups, not

involved with the OpenDesign Project or its platform

design, development or test. Eight volunteer partic-

ipants answered the evaluation questionnaire. The

objective of this questionnaire was to understand the

ability of the platform artefacts to promote delibera-

tion, rationale and awareness, from the point of view

of activists and the hands-on course participants (plat-

form users).

The questionnaire encompasses 28 questions or-

ganized into two different parts. Part 1 with 19 ques-

tions regarding Deliberation, Rationale, and Aware-

ness, and Part 2 with 9 questions regarding Feelings

and Usability. The questions in Part 1 used a 9 point

Likert scale ranging from ‘completely disagree’ to

‘completely agree’ for 13 questions, and included 6

open questions. The questions in Part 2 used a 5

point Likert scale ranging from ‘completely unhappy’

to ‘completely happy’, using a manikin with different

facial expressions for expressing the feeling.

The closed questions of Part 1 resulted in the fol-

lowing mode values (Table 3).

For the Part 2, in the 9 questions related with feel-

ings and usability, in a 5 points Likert scale of satis-

faction with different aspects of interaction (e.g. col-

laboration, self presence in the solution, facility of

use, feeling able to contribute, etc.), ﬁve (of eight re-

spondents) gave the highest value (5) to them. The

lowest value attributed to an item was 3 (in 5). In

summary, the mode of the responses for the questions

in Part 2 are as follows (Table 4).

As for the open questions of Part 1, the main ﬁnd-

ings regarding deliberation,rationale and awareness

were:

Deliberation Aspects

• All respondents somewhat agree that those in the

same physical location have discussed regardless

of the platform, but some agree their discussion

was moved by the artifacts and they have recorded

the results of the face-to-face discussion on the

platform. The recording is necessary and hope-

fully sufﬁcient to make what happened out of the

platform to become a fact capable of impacting

those who have not participated in that particular

face-to-face discussion.

Table 3: Mode of the answers for the Part 1 closed ques-

tions.

Statement Mode

The format of the argumentation

(Pros/Neutral/Cons) is useful for collective

decision making

The format of the argumentation

(Pros/Neutral/Cons) facilitates collective

decision making

Voting (Like/Dislike) is useful for

collective decision-making

Voting (Like/Dislike) facilitates collective

decision-making

I discussed with another workshop

participant regardless of the platform

I recorded the result of a face-to-face

discussion on the platform

I considered arguments recorded on the

platform to build my own opinion

I can easily relate a requirement to a

stakeholder

A solution proposal is always related to

the problem that it seeks to solve.

It was easy to relate a requirement on the

Ladder to the proposed solution that gave

rise to it.

Arguments of other participants inﬂuenced

my opinion about the importance of a

problem

Arguments of other participants inﬂuenced

my opinion about the importance of a

stakeholder I had not considered

Arguments of other participants inﬂuenced

my opinion about the value of a solution

• All respondents agree that the artifacts in the plat-

form allowed them to deliberate on the proposed

ideas. They emphasized the structure of the plat-

form as a key aspect to orient, provide sequence

and overview of contributed information, keep-

ing good ﬂexibility and interaction among people.

Besides structure, they mention aspects of ﬂexi-

bility of use, visibility of ideas and of thinking

processes, e.g.: “They facilitate the visualization

of the ideas”, “ideas and thinking stimulation”.

• When asked how deliberation and decision-

making could be improved, they pointed out that

consolidation still happens depending on video

conference support and that could be improved

with mechanisms such as: digital mediator, dis-

cussion turns, focus groups.

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Table 4: Mode of the answers for the Part 2 questions.

Question Mode

Did you feel like collaborating with

others?

Did you feel represented in the

discussion?

Did you feel the presence of others in

the discussion?

Did you feel you achieved something

collaborative?

Did you feel you were able to

contribute?

Did you feel you free to express your

ideas?

Was the collaboration spontaneous? 4

Would you use the system to solve

another problem?

How easy-difﬁcult was it to use the

platform?

Rationale Aspects

• Most respondents agree to be easy to relate a re-

quirement to a stakeholder, a solution proposal to

the issue it seeks to solve and in lesser degree to

link a requirement on SF to the proposed solution

that gives rise to it. Regarding the artefacts, ”They

contribute to build a more complete perspective

of what is being discussed, in different dimensions

that may not have been considered.”

• When asked what other mechanisms could be

more appropriate for making the rationale visi-

ble, they suggest “schemas, maps, visual mind

maps”,”It will be helpful if there is a graph net-

work can show the relationships between different

solutions”. This last aspect is something an in-

tegration of the QUID tool to the Platform could

offer, visually facilitating a global view of the hu-

man and non-human actors in the solution track-

ing, as the Figures 7 to 10 show us.

Awareness Aspects

• According to the respondents, the platform col-

laborates to understand the others point of view,

making visible their arguments in a non biased

way. Visibility of all ideas and their inﬂuence on

the others is mentioned by the majority of respon-

dents, e.g. “The ideas are all shown on the plat-

form, which are easy to check out.” Nevertheless,

they acknowledge there is still room for improve-

ment:”Yes, in some way because we can see pro-

ductions (stakeholders, problems..) of other peo-

ple and their comments. We can see how prob-

lems, ideas and other productions are related as

well. But the artifacts can improve to make aware-

ness even better.

These results, added to the content generated through

the platform during the activity, has shown the use of

the platform was smooth, and the boundary objects

were valuable as mediators along the process that ini-

tiated with a challenge and ended up with requirement

speciﬁcations of an elected idea of solution.

5 CONCLUSION

The concept of open design, with origin in the open

source code for software, has been acknowledged as a

signiﬁcant phenomenon, supported by trends in con-

temporary digital technology and organization. The

nature of open design presupposes the interaction of

diverse people towards a co-creation of the design

product (e.g. a plan, a drawing, a requirements list for

the intended product or service, etc.), and with dif-

ferent motivations (e.g. to inﬂuence the ﬁnal result,

to voluntarily contribute in the process, to get a ben-

eﬁt of it, etc.). The lack of online platform tools to

support interaction and co-construction in open de-

sign has been pointed out by the research community.

In this work we presented the OpenDesign plat-

form, characterizing it by its boundary objects (arte-

facts), participants and design process. The Open-

Design platform draws on artefacts of the Organisa-

tional Semiotics and Participatory Design, to conduct

a socially-aware design. A case study was carried out

with participants in two geographically distant sites

attending a summer school, interacting through the

platform artefacts to discuss a proposed challenge and

to evolve together a design solution.

Data from the design process, generated through

the platform artefacts, were analysed under the lens

of the Actor Network Theory, through a graphical

representation in which both the participants as well

as the boundary objects are part of the same net-

work. This representation allows us to reveal the dif-

ferent paths the participants weave along the interac-

tion through the platform, the tracks they leave while

discussing, proposing ideas, deliberating, interacting

with the others mediated by different boundary ob-

jects. Also, answers to a questionnaire on the use of

the platform show the participants had a perception of

the deliberation, rationale and awareness in the use of

the platform. A very positive feedback on their feel-

ings and usability were also observed.

Further studies involve analysis of suggested en-

hancements in the artefacts, and the integration of the

tool used for providing the visual map of the net-

OpenDesign: Analyzing Deliberation and Rationale in an Exploratory Case Study

521

work of participants and boundary objects in medi-

ation along the (open) design process.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is ﬁnancially supported by the

ao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) (grants

#2015/24300-9 and #2018/25972-9) and by the Na-

tional Council for Scientiﬁc and Technological De-

velopment (CNPq) (grant #306272/2017-2).

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