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14 she belongs to each community. Users can find out the position of other registered users by dragging a ‘radar square’— IDRAK displays in real-time a list of all user names within the radar boundaries, and the user can then click on a name to retrieve the Digital ID. The Instant Dialogue and Knowledge Repository enables logged-in users to engage in synchronous and asynchronous conversations (Figure 3). The Instant Dialogue is a synchronous chat feature. Users that log in the middle of an ongoing conversation can read the parts they missed by scrolling up and down the text in the chat box. Each color-coded text entry is preceded by the name of the user who sent it. The Instant Dialogue automatically displays notifications when new users log in or out of IDRAK, as well as when a user changes her availability status in the passive social proxy. The ‘Save’ button in the Instant Dialogue box enables users to save all or part of a dialogue into the Repository. IDRAK removes a conversation record from the chat box 15 minutes after the last user has logged out. This feature gives the last user a chance to log in again in case she changed her mind and wishes to save the conversation into the Repository. It also safeguards against unexpected lost connectivity.
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Figure 3 - IDRAK User Interface showing: (6) Knowledge Repository and (7) Instant Dialogue The Knowledge Repository enables users to examine documented conversations as well as to engage in asynchronous conversations. The save button in the Dialogue is disabled by default, to disallow users from documenting a (part of) conversation in the Repository without categorizing it first according to a preset design ontology. The save button automatically becomes enabled after a user completes the categorization task. A Windows-type file explorer enables users to browse and retrieve documented conversations, displayed according to the ontology rules. We describe later in this article the ontology that we employed in our evaluation methodology. The Repository also provides users with a box to type text. Thus, a user can asynchronously initiate a new conversation or contribute to a conversation documented in the Repository.
16 4 EVALUATING THE USABILITY OF DIGITAL SOCIALIZATION: THE CASE OF IDRAK Methodology
We operationalized our methodology to evaluate the usability of digital socialization to support virtual engineering design teams by employing IDRAK to play the Delta Design exercise. In this board-based exercise, a four-element design team (structural engineer, thermal engineer, project manager, and architect) faces the challenge of developing a 2-dimensional concept of a building suitable for, and attractive to, the inhabitants of the imaginary Deltoid planet (Bucciarelli 1994). The design is formed by a set of adjacent triangular red- and blue- colored tiles (termed Deltas) that the team needs to assemble on a diamond-shaped grid. The design requirements for each discipline shape the preferences of each participant about the overall configuration, the number and color of the tiles, and the way the tiles overlap. Before the exercise, each team participant receives two documents. The first document is a generic design brief that all participants receive. It describes the goals of the exercise, the role of each discipline participating in the exercise, and the key design criteria that the solution needs to meet. The second document is a technical design brief, and each participant receives a different version. Each technical brief describes in detail the requirements that a discipline needs to consider to ensure that the design solution satisfies the criteria for that discipline. The two engineers, for example, are provided with analytical formulae and thresholds necessary to verify whether the design solution meets the thermal and structural requirements; the project manager is provided with formulae necessary to estimate the building cost and time; and the architect receives particular information about the client’s aesthetic preferences and space needs (Bucciarelli 1994). Our evaluation methodology assumes that a project team cannot generate a satisfactory solution unless participants share what they know about the specific technical requirements that 17 apply in the imaginary Deltoid plane. General knowledge that a practitioner acquires through education and practice is inadequate to resolve the Delta design problem (Bucciarelli 1994a). Rather, participants need to first develop tacit knowledge by internalizing (Nonaka 2000) the knowledge codified in the generic and technical briefs. They then need to socialize to timely share their know-how over the exercise. We handled the issue of test reliability by ensuring that all experiments unfolded under the same set of conditions. First, we disallowed participants from socializing through face-to-face and phone conversations ex-ante of the exercise. Second, team participants sat away from each other in the computer lab to force socialization through IDRAK during the exercise. Third, we gave each team the same time (90 minutes) to generate a design concept. The participants in the experiments cooperated with our requests. We complemented the functionalities of IDRAK with a digital board where users could pick and move the tiles on a diamond-shaped grid (Figure 4). Further, we instantiated the knowledge repository of IDRAK with a small subset of the e-COGNOS ontology — an ontology on the semantics underscoring the content and interdependencies of documents used in construction projects to promote consistent knowledge management within collaborative environments (Zarli et al. 2000). e-COGNOS comprises a set of process models that include main user profiles (e.g., project manager, architect, structural designer), as well as a set of class diagrams to describe design tasks (i.e., site analysis, sketch design, programming, estimating) and the relationships between tasks and outputs. Yüklə 268,58 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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