Tag: design-rationale

Creativity and Rationale book – reflections

The third major book in the field of Design Rationale has just been published.  From my perspective, this book’s publication gives me pause for thought, as it includes a chapter from one of my PhD students, when the first book 16 years ago had a chapter from my own PhD. This feels something of a milestone as I look back over the journey I’ve been on, and the debt that I owe to people like Jack Carroll, my PhD supervisors Nick Hammond and Allan MacLean, and my close collaborators Jeff Conklin, Al Selvin and Maarten Sierhuis.

But first, the new book:

Creativity and Rationale: Enhancing Human Experience by Design, edited by Jack Carroll…

  • “Explores whether and how creativity and rationale can have mutually facilitative interactions
  • State of the art volume developed from the NSF Workshop ‘Creativity and Rationale in Software Design’
  • Includes contributions from leading experts in several software design research communities

Creativity and rationale comprise an essential tension in design. They are two sides of the coin; contrary, complementary, but perhaps also interdependent. Designs always serve purposes. They always have an internal logic. They can be queried, explained, and evaluated. These characteristics are what design rationale is about. But at the same time designs always provoke experiences and insights. They open up possibilities, raise questions, and engage human sense making. Design is always about creativity.”

Design Rationale was the first field in which I engaged as an HCI/Hypertext researcher, doing my PhD 1989-91 at University of York (under Nick Hammond) sponsored by Rank Xerox Cambridge EuroPARC (under Allan MacLean), working on the cognitive affordances of the QOC Questions-Options-Criteria representational scheme for argumentation-based design rationale. EuroPARC as it was in those days, was the first satellite lab set up to PARC, led by Tom Moran. With Tom, Jack Carroll was of course already a leading HCI figure, and together they led the first Design Rationale workshop at CHI’90 (also my first CHI, where I got to the Doctoral Consortium!), which became the 1991 HCI journal special issue, and then the first milestone book in 1996, Design Rationale Concepts, Techniques, and Use. I was very proud to have a chapter in that book from my PhD’s empirical studies, which was conducted very much in the psychology tradition of a cognitive task analysis of video from lab-based studies.

The Design Rationale meme spread, and the next period saw an extraordinarily fruitful collaboration with Jeff Conklin, Al Selvin and Maarten Sierhuis, in which we combined my interests around visual hypermedia, the power of modelling from Maarten’s work, and Jeff and Al’s interests in the skills needed to use this well in the heat of real organizational sensemaking. Our vehicle for testing our ideas was a software tool called Compendium. We reflected on the lessons we were learning from 15 years work in a chapter in the second major DR book in 2006, which came from the software engineering community: Rationale Management in Software Engineering.

With my move to the Open University, I began to broaden the concepts and technologies from Design Rationale to other forms of intellectual work, which saw impacts in the broader notions of Visualizing Argumentation, Knowledge Cartography, Scholarly Publishing, and Learning Technology, and with the emergence of the social/semantic web, is highly relevant to Computational Argumentation, CSCW/Collective Intelligence, and Evidence-based Policy. Most recently, we are using structured, online deliberation platforms – which include IBIS – to inform the kinds of analytics that can give insight into learning and sensemaking processes online.

But running like a thread throughout there has always been a very thorny adoption challenge to confront, which was at the core of my PhD, all my work since, and which has been explored by many others from different angles. In brief, it takes intellectual effort to record rationale, or to structure ideas as arguments, and even more to do so in a structured format, so that effort has to repay itself immediately or very soon, to those engaged in deliberation (it can’t be delayed gratification which will reap benefits for unknown people at an unknown future moment). This requires a detailed understanding of how symbolic representations shape cognitive and group dynamics. The chapter in the new book (journal version) comes from Al Selvin’s PhD, based on close video analysis of novices and experts using Compendium, which develops a new language for talking about practice with such tools. This seeks to describe the capacities and dispositions that a practitioner (using any representational tool) needs to support real-time collective sensemaking. When I look back to the chapter I wrote from my own 1991 PhD, this represents a quantum leap in how we think about “usability” and “skill” in HCI — progress indeed.

In my mind, this is one of the new literacies for the 21st Century that we need to teach, starting with our young people. And my thanks to all who have helped me on this journey so far.

Working with “Learning Futures” on authentic enquiry

Learning Futures is a national initiative to foster, evaluate and share secondary school innovation, around four priorities which they see as central to the future shape of learning in schools (but we’re interested in its relevance to post-secondary learning as well…):

Extended Learning Relationships: The 21st century heralds the possibility of a system redesign that can genuinely respond to the needs of learners and the demands for anytime/anywhere learning, collaborative and independent learning, and personalised learning.

Enquiry-Based Learning: Enquiry-based learning is a key component of the Learning Futures model. Its premise is that how students learn is as important as what they learn, because learning is a skill they can carry with them for their entire lives.

School as ‘Learning Commons’: During the first year of Learning Futures, students have begun using school as a ‘base camp’ for enquiries that take them into the community, thereby expanding their learning relationships. At the same time, the number of people with a shared interest in the life of the school is growing and relationships within school are becoming less hierarchical.

School as ‘Base Camp’: A genuine 21st century school should be a base camp rather than a single destination – a place where students meet to explore learning opportunities that take them into their communities, onto the web, and to local businesses and employers. It should also be a hub that creates connections with families, and with learning partners beyond school.

Now in its second year, LF is expanding its mission by commissioning the development of free/open source tools to make the project’s findings accessible to a global audience. LF are funding the Hypermedia Discourse team, at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) to develop EnquiryBlogger, a project I’m co-leading with OU colleague Rebecca Ferguson, and Ruth Deakin Crick at Univ. Bristol. This is extending the leading WordPress blogging platform with plugins which tune it for enquiry-based learning, by embedding visual reflection and analytics tools based on Univ. Bristol’s ELLI framework for learning dispositions [1][resources], Ruth Deakin Crick’s work on authentic enquiry [2], and the  pedagogical principles emerging from the LF programme.

This project runs from Nov 2010 – June 2011. It includes the piloting of one or more of KMi’s knowledge/argument mapping tools, since these provide representational scaffolding for key learning and thinking capabilities that LF seeks to foster.

I’ve just spent two days in Manchester with the LF management team, representatives from participating schools, plus folks from the newly launched Studio Schools Trust, introducing them to:

  • EnquiryBlogger v0.1, completed after a 20-day development sprint last month (acknowledgements to Geoff Austin for superb programming!)
  • Compendium 2.0, a much more mature tool for mapping issues, arguments and ideas, under development at the OU since 2002 (funded most recently by the Hewlett Foundation, and before that UK Research Councils).

Here are our slides introducing EnquiryBlogger (PPT/PDF):

EnquiryBlogger: A Learning Futures Tool

I created three Compendium maps over the event, which illustrate quite different forms of visualization to externalise and socialise personal cognition.

Example template map to scaffold reflection during an enquiry

Firstly, part of the project’s goal is to explore how KMi’s knowledge mapping software tools can work in tandem with EnquiryBlogger. As shown in the slides, I put together this example to provoke some reflection.

Mapping the pedagogical rationale behind an enquiry process

Secondly, Mark Lovatt from Cramlington Learning Village ran a hands-on enquiry session, in which we used the CLV enquiry wheel as a procedural scaffold to design an enquiry project. I mapped my team’s deliberations and emerging plan for the project, including the pedagogical rationale behind each step. Then I (very quickly) dropped in CLV wheel icons to show where it seemed to fit. Interestingly, there seem to be two clusters of CLV icons, which mirror an early review point, and then a more in depth review following deeper enquiry.

Below is the map I walked through in the presentation of our team’s design.

Mapping teachers’ collaborative deliberation and decisions during the design of an enquiry project

Thirdly, it was great to have Nusrat Faizullah and Zarlasht Walaimzai from Studio Schools, introducing us to the core ideas behind their approach to enquiry-based learning. In this breakout group, I used Compendium as the digital equivalent of organising lots of sticky notes on the wall, but structuring them as Issues/Ideas/Pros/Cons.

I also created some tags corresponding to Studio Schools’ learning and thinking capabilities, which you can see on the left of the screenshot. This demonstrated how we’d use the tagging interface in Compendium to track coverage of all relevant capabilities, as well as curriculum areas:

It was a rapid prototype knocked up on the fly, to indicate how we might develop the approach more systematically into sets of templates and tags to scaffold a team engaged in collaborative design of an enquiry project, but it seemed to work as an object to think with, and I look forward to exploring its potential further, since several people were enthusiastic. (Can Compendium be used to engage young people, not just adults planning activities for them? Yes!… [3] and informal examples 1/2/3)

Overall, this was a fantastic two days: spending time with some of the most forward thinking school practitioners and innovators in the country was a privilege, and we’re now planning New Year’s EnquiryBlogger pilots in LF schools.

[1] Deakin Crick, R., Broadfoot, P. and Claxton, G. (2004). Developing an Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory: The ELLI Project. Assessment in Education, 11, (3), pp. 247-272.

[2] Deakin Crick, R. (2009). Inquiry-based learning: reconciling the personal with the public in a democratic and archaeological pedagogy. Curriculum Journal, 20, (1), pp. 73-92.

[3] Okada, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2008). Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps as a Research Tool to Investigate the Quality of School Pupils’ Scientific Argumentation. International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 31(3), pp. 291–315 (Special Issue: Coffin, C. and O’Halloran, K.A, (Eds.) Researching Argumentation in Educational Contexts: New Methods, New Directions). [blog]

Making Conversations Visible

Yesterday I was delighted to accept an invitation to speak at the British Computer Society’s Requirements Engineering Specialist Group AGM. They wanted me to reflect on the journey that I’ve been on with Design Rationale, which started with my PhD in 1988 in York/Xerox EuroPARC. Since then we’ve come a long way, and it was good to wind the clock back 22 years (yikes) and ponder how some relatively simple notational schemes for structuring deliberation (such as IBIS/gIBIS and QOC) have since matured.

The critical thing from my perspective has been that we have learnt more about:

  1. developing open, flexible, software support: Compendium has >80,000 downloads by >50,000 unique users; Cohere is starting to become a practical tool; many other tools now exist
  2. the nature of fluency with the tool, as reflected in lab studies, field experience codified as Dialogue Mapping, Conversational Modelling, and Knowledge Art

There are now non-trivial cases of design rationale being embedded in organisations, and not only from our strand of work of course. Much of my work has developed beyond just design rationale of course, to consider structured deliberation in schools, HE, and other contexts of organisational discourse. It is, however, also the case that DR, and structured deliberation, are not yet mainstream tools. A forthcoming blog will reflect on a recent workshop that considered some of these issues.

Just out: “Creativity and Rationale in Software Design”

All my research and software development on argument visualization, sensemaking and organizational memory derives originally from work on approaches to representing Design Rationale (particularly for human-centred computing) since starting my PhD in the late 80s on the usability and utility of argumentation-based design rationale. The landmark volume published in 1996 was Design Rationale: Concepts, Techniques and Use, edited by Tom Moran and John Carroll. A decade later saw Rationale Management in Software Engineering (Eds. Dutoit, McCall, Mistrik & Paech), this time from a more software engineering perspective, reflecting on a decade’s progress.

Now, following an NSF workshop last year chaired by John Carroll, a special journal issue of Human Technology has just been published, with a specific focus on one of the most interesting tensions in DR: that between explicit, logical Rationale, and Creativity. Since HT is open access, you’ll find the full volume right here…

Carroll, J.M. (2010). (Ed.) Creativity and Rationale in Software Design. Special Issue of Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments, Volume 6, Number 1, pp. 1-149. Available at: www.humantechnology.jyu.fi

This includes an article led by KMi’s Al Selvin, as blogged earlier under the broader heading of Knowledge Art, which nicely illustrates how we are seeing deeper principles emerge from the longitudinal study of the original DR tools, as they spread to new arenas, and a language emerged for the skillsets and practices that make them effective.

Knowledge Art

One of the advantages of a long term technology R&D programme is that you get to ask questions that can’t possibly be answered with very early prototypes, which while demonstrate exciting concepts, never really have time to be embedded in real practice.

We are now beginning to construct answers to what I consider to be a foundational question about knowledge media literacy:

What does it mean to be literate in crafting representations that help a group make sense of the world?

Arguably, this is a literacy of first order importance as we confront novel challenges of overwhelming complexity, which will always (and increasingly) require external representations as extensions and augmentations of personal and collective cognition. However smart our  technologies are, people must then engage in sensemaking activity around them to decide how to act. If a group is building a model of the world in some medium (paper +/or digital) what is the skillset to orchestrate effective interaction around and via that representation?

Al Selvin unpacks this question much more richly, in what he evocatively calls Knowledge Art. In the latest paper to emerge from Al’s research, we present a language for talking about the practice, and experience, of Knowledge Art. This draws on work from sensemaking, narrative, aesthetics, ethics, and improvisation. It’s based on studying novice and expert use of our Compendium visual hypermedia tool, and is discussed in the context of a specific application to design teams, but the work is intentionally framed in terms designed to apply to many other tools and applications. It provides a way to “make sense of a sensemaking session”, such as the heatmap visualization shown here.

Selvin, A., Buckingham Shum, S.J. & Aakhus, M. (2010). The Practice Level in Participatory Design Rationale: Studying Practitioner Moves and Choices. Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Humans in ICT Environments (Special Issue on Creativity and Rationale, Ed. Jack Carroll), To appear May 2010. [www.humantechnology.jyu.fi]. Preprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/20948

Abstract. Most research in design rationale focuses on specific tools, methods, models, or artifacts. There has been relatively little attention to the practice level of design rationale work: the human experience of working with the tools and methods to create rationale artifacts. This paper explores a particular juncture of creativity and design rationale that is found in the special case of helping groups of people construct representations of rationale in live meetings. Doing such work poses challenges and requires skills different than those of individuals working alone. We describe the role of practitioners, who perform caretaking and facilitative functions in collaborative or participatory design rationale sessions, and present a set of analytical tools aimed at making the practice level more visible. We locate the analysis in a theoretical framework aimed at understanding the experiential dimensions of such practice, including sensemaking, narrative, aesthetics, ethics, and improvisation.