2014 - 2018

“Affordance” was introduced to HCI by Donald A. Norman in the late 1980s and quickly became one of the field’s key concepts, widely used by researchers, educators, and practitioners. In particular, in terms of collaborative working, affordances have been used as tools to understand and describe the different characteristics of media. However, affordances of media would not play the same role every time. Even the same affordance can cause different collaboration behaviors and phenomena depending on the context used. In this reason, to use media effectively, we need to understand media affordances and their influences on specific contexts. Especially, design problems tend to be large and complex, and include various characteristics of activities. Accordingly, it is critical to exploit appropriate media and their affordances at the stage of collaborative design process to solve design problems. However, there are few projects that directly address how media affordances affect the collaborative design process. The aim of this research project is to reveal the influences of media on the collaborative design process. More specifically, we identify compelling media affordances for design collaboration from a comparative study of online document tools and face-to-face interaction, and analyze their effects on designers’ interaction and each design problem-solving activities. By doing so, we will provide implications for designing appropriate media to support effective design collaboration.