arXiv subjects

Willemien Visser

Publications and source records attributed to Willemien Visser.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2010

Function and form of gestures in a collaborative design meeting

This paper examines the relationship between gestures' function and form in design collaboration. It adopts a cognitive design research viewpoint. The analysis is restricted to gesticulations and emblems. The data analysed come from an empirical study conducted on an architectural design meeting. Based on a previous analysis of the data, guided by our model of design as the construction of representations, we distinguish representational and organisational functions. The results of the present analysis are that, even if form-function association tendencies exist, gestures with a particular function may take various forms, and particular gestural movements as regards form can fulfil different functions. Reconsidering these results and other research on gesture, we formulate the assumption that, if formal characteristics do not allow differentiating functional gestures in collaboration, context-dependent, semantic characteristics may be more appropriate. We also envision the possibility that closer inspection of the data reveal tendencies of another nature.

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arXiv2009

The Function of Gesture in an Architectural Design Meeting

This text presents a cognitive-psychology analysis of spontaneous, co-speech gestures in a face-to-face architectural design meeting (A1 in DTRS7). The long-term objective is to formulate specifications for remote collaborative-design systems, especially for supporting the use of different semiotic modalities (multi-modal interaction). According to their function for design, interaction, and collaboration, we distinguish different gesture families: representational (entity designating or specifying), organisational (management of discourse, interaction, or functional design actions), focalising, discourse and interaction modulating, and disambiguating gestures. Discussion and conclusion concern the following points. It is impossible to attribute fixed functions to particular gesture forms. "Designating" gestures may also have a design function. The gestures identified in A1 possess a certain generic character. The gestures identified are neither systematically irreplaceable, nor optional accessories to speech or drawing. We discuss the possibilities for gesture in computer-supported collaborative software systems. The paper closes on our contribution to gesture studies and cognitive design research.

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arXiv2009

Design: One, but in different forms

This overview paper defends an augmented cognitively oriented generic-design hypothesis: there are both significant similarities between the design activities implemented in different situations and crucial differences between these and other cognitive activities; yet, characteristics of a design situation (related to the design process, the designers, and the artefact) introduce specificities in the corresponding cognitive activities and structures that are used, and in the resulting designs. We thus augment the classical generic-design hypothesis with that of different forms of designing. We review the data available in the cognitive design research literature and propose a series of candidates underlying such forms of design, outlining a number of directions requiring further elaboration.

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arXiv2007

L'analyse de l'expertise du point de vue de l'ergonomie cognitive

This paper presents a review of methods for collecting and analysing data on complex activities. Starting with methods developed for design, we examine the possibility to transpose them to other complex activities, especially activities referring to sensorial expertise. Résumé Ce texte présente une revue de méthodes pour recueillir et analyser des données sur des actvités complexes. A partir de méthodes développées pour des actvités de conception, nous examinons la possibilité de les transposer à d'autres actvités complexes, notamment des actvités faisant à appel à des expertises sensorielles.

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arXiv2007

Dynamic aspects of individual design activities. A cognitive ergonomics viewpoint

This paper focuses on the use of knowledge possessed by designers. Data collection was based on observations (by the cognitive ergonomics researcher) and simultaneous verbalisations (by the designers) in empirical studies conducted in the context of industrial design projects. The contribution of this research is typical of cognitive ergonomics, in that it provides data on actual activities implemented by designers in their actual work situation (rather than on prescribed and/or idealised processes and methods). Data presented concern global strategies (the way in which designers actually organise their activity) and local strategies (reuse in design). Results from cognitive ergonomics and other research that challenges the way in which people are supposed to work with existing systems are generally not received warmly. Abundant corroboration of such results is required before industry may consider taking them into account. The opportunistic organisation of design activity is taken here as an example of this reluctance. The results concerning this aspect of design have been verified repeatedly, but only prototypes and experimental systems implementing some of the requirements formulated on their basis, are under development.

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arXiv2007

Designing as Construction of Representations: A Dynamic Viewpoint in Cognitive Design Research

This article presents a cognitively oriented viewpoint on design. It focuses on cognitive, dynamic aspects of real design, i.e., the actual cognitive activity implemented by designers during their work on professional design projects. Rather than conceiving de-signing as problem solving - Simon's symbolic information processing (SIP) approach - or as a reflective practice or some other form of situated activity - the situativity (SIT) approach - we consider that, from a cognitive viewpoint, designing is most appropriately characterised as a construction of representations. After a critical discussion of the SIP and SIT approaches to design, we present our view-point. This presentation concerns the evolving nature of representations regarding levels of abstraction and degrees of precision, the function of external representations, and specific qualities of representation in collective design. Designing is described at three levels: the organisation of the activity, its strategies, and its design-representation construction activities (different ways to generate, trans-form, and evaluate representations). Even if we adopt a "generic design" stance, we claim that design can take different forms depending on the nature of the artefact, and we propose some candidates for dimensions that allow a distinction to be made between these forms of design. We discuss the potential specificity of HCI design, and the lack of cognitive design research occupied with the quality of design. We close our discussion of representational structures and activities by an outline of some directions regarding their functional linkages.

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arXiv2007

Conception individuelle et collective. Approche de l'ergonomie cognitive [Individual and Collective Design. The Cognitive-Ergonomics Approach]

This text presents the cognitive-ergonomics approach to design, in both its individual and collective form. It focuses on collective design with respect to individual design. The theoretical framework adopted is that of information processing, specified for design problems. The cognitive characteristics of design problems are presented: the effects of their ill-defined character and of the different types of representation implemented in solving these problems, amongst others the more or less "satisficing" character of the different possible solutions. The text first describes the cognitive activities implemented in both individual and collective design: different types of control activities and of the executive activities of solution development and evaluation. Specific collective-design characteristics are then presented: co-design and distributed-design activities, temporo-operative and cognitive synchronisation, and different types of argumentation, of co-designers' intervention modes in the design process, of solution-proposals evaluation. The paper concludes by a confrontation between the two types of design, individual and collective.

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arXiv2007

Multimodality and parallelism in design interaction: co-designers' alignment and coalitions

This paper presents an analysis of various forms of articulation between graphico-gestural and verbal modalities in parallel interactions between designers in a collaborative design situation. Based on our methodological framework, we illustrate several forms of multimodal articulations, that is, integrated and non-integrated, through extracts from a corpus on an architectural design meeting. These modes reveal alignment or disalignment between designers, with respect to the focus of their activities. They also show different forms of coalition.

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arXiv2007

Quantitative Measurements of the Influence of Participant Roles during Peer Review Meetings

Peer review meetings (PRMs) are formal meetings during which peers systematically analyze artifacts to improve their quality and report on non-conformities. This paper presents an approach based on protocol analysis for quantifying the influence of participant roles during PRMs. Three views are used to characterize the seven defined participant roles. The project view defines three roles supervisor, procedure expert and developer. The meeting view defines two roles: author and reviewer, and the task view defines the roles reflecting direct and indirect interest in the artifact under review. The analysis, based on log-linear modeling, shows that review activities have different patterns, depending on their focus: form or content. The influence of each role is analyzed with respect to this focus. Interpretation of the quantitative data leads to the suggestion that PRMs could be improved by creating three different types of reviews, each of which collects together specific roles: form review, cognitive synchronization review and content review.

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arXiv2007

Changing our view on design evaluation meetings methodology: a study of software technical review meetings

By contrast to design meetings, design evaluation meetings (DEMs) have generally been considered as situations in which, according to DEMs methodologies, design activities are quite marginal. In a study of DEMs in software development, i.e. in technical review meetings following a particular review methodology, we showed: (i) the occurrence of design activities as part of an argumentation process; (ii) the relative importance of cognitive synchronisation as a prerequisite for evaluation; (iii) the important role played in evaluation by argumentation that makes explicit the underlying design rationale (DR). On the basis of our results, we discuss the potential for using DR methodologies in this kind of meetings.

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arXiv2007

Cognitive Effort in Collective Software Design: Methodological Perspectives in Cognitive Ergonomics

Empirical software engineering is concerned with measuring, or estimating, both the effort put into the software process and the quality of its product. We defend the idea that measuring process effort and product quality and establishing a relation between the two cannot be performed without a model of cognitive and collective activities involved in software design, and without measurement of these activities. This is the object of our field, i.e. Cognitive Ergonomics of design. After a brief presentation of its theoretical and methodological foundations, we will discuss a cognitive approach to design activities and its potential to provide new directions in ESE. Then we will present and discuss an illustration of the methodological directions we have proposed for the analysis and measurement of cognitive activities in the context of collective software design. The two situations analysed are technical review meetings, and Request For Comments-like procedures in Open Source Software design.

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arXiv2007

Articulation entre composantes verbale et graphico-gestuelle de l'interaction dans des réunions de conception architecturale

This study is focused on the role of external representations, e.g., skteches, in collaborative architectural design. In particular, we analyse (1) the use of graphico-gestural modalities and, (2) the articulation modes between graphico-gestural and verbal modalities in design interaction. We have elaborated a first classification which distinguishes between two modes of articulation, articulation in integrated activities versus articulation in parallel activities.

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arXiv2007

Measuring Cognitive Activities in Software Engineering

This paper presents an approach to the study of cognitive activities in collaborative software development. This approach has been developed by a multidisciplinary team made up of software engineers and cognitive psychologists. The basis of this approach is to improve our understanding of software development by observing professionals at work. The goal is to derive lines of conduct or good practices based on observations and analyses of the processes that are naturally used by software engineers. The strategy involved is derived from a standard approach in cognitive science. It is based on the videotaping of the activities of software engineers, transcription of the videos, coding of the transcription, defining categories from the coded episodes and defining cognitive behaviors or dialogs from the categories. This project presents two original contributions that make this approach generic in software engineering. The first contribution is the introduction of a formal hierarchical coding scheme, which will enable comparison of various types of observations. The second is the merging of psychological and statistical analysis approaches to build a cognitive model. The details of this new approach are illustrated with the initial data obtained from the analysis of technical review meetings.

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arXiv2006

Both Generic Design and Different Forms of Designing

This paper defends an augmented cognitively oriented "generic-design hypothesis": There are both significant similarities between the design activities implemented in different situations and crucial differences between these and other cognitive activities; yet, characteristics of a design situation (i.e., related to the designers, the artefact, and other task variables influencing these two) introduce specificities in the corresponding design activities and cognitive structures that are used. We thus combine the generic-design hypothesis with that of different "forms" of designing. In this paper, outlining a number of directions that need further elaboration, we propose a series of candidate dimensions underlying such forms of design.

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arXiv2006

Reuse of designs: Desperately seeking an interdisciplinary cognitive approach

This text analyses the papers accepted for the workshop "Reuse of designs: an interdisciplinary cognitive approach". Several dimensions and questions considered as important (by the authors and/or by us) are addressed: What about the "interdisciplinary cognitive" character of the approaches adopted by the authors? Is design indeed a domain where the use of CBR is particularly suitable? Are there important distinctions between CBR and other approaches? Which types of knowledge -other than cases- is being, or might be, used in CBR systems? With respect to cases: are there different "types" of case and different types of case use? which formats are adopted for their representation? do cases have "components"? how are cases organised in the case memory? Concerning their retrieval: which types of index are used? on which types of relation is retrieval based? how does one retrieve only a selected number of cases, i.e., how does one retrieve only the "best" cases? which processes and strategies are used, by the system and by its user? Finally, some important aspects of CBR system development are shortly discussed: should CBR systems be assistance or autonomous systems? how can case knowledge be "acquired"? what about the empirical evaluation of CBR systems? The conclusion points out some lacking points: not much attention is paid to the user, and few papers have indeed adopted an interdisciplinary cognitive approach.

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arXiv2006

Evocation and elaboration of solutions: Different types of problem-solving actions. An empirical study on the design of an aerospace artifact

An observational study was conducted on a professional designer working on a design project in aerospace industry. The protocol data were analyzed in order to gain insight into the actions the designer used for the development of a solution to the corresponding problem. Different processes are described: from the "simple" evocation of a solution existing in memory, to the elaboration of a "new" solution out of mnesic entities without any clear link to the current problem. Control is addressed in so far as it concerns the priority among the different types of development processes: the progression from evocation of a "standard" solution to elaboration of a "new" solution is supposed to correspond to the resulting order, that is, the one in which the designer's activity proceeds. Short discussions of * the double status of "problem" and "solution," * the problem/solution knowledge units in memory and their access, and * the different abstraction levels on which problem and solution representations are developed, are illustrated by the results.

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