Raison d'etre: Embodying design history and rationale in hypermedia folklore—an experiment in reflective design practice
| Date | 01 April 1994 |
| Published date | 01 April 1994 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb047937 |
| Pages | 59-81 |
| Author | John M. Carroll,Sherman R. Alpert,John Karat,Mary S. Van Deusen,Mary Beth Rosson |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
RAISON D'ETRE: EMBODYING DESIGN HISTORY
AND RATIONALE IN HYPERMEDIA FOLKLORE—
AN EXPERIMENT IN REFLECTIVE DESIGN PRACTICE
John M. Carroll, Sherman R. Alpert, John Karat,
Mary S. Van Deusen, and Mary Beth Rosson
Raison d'Etre is a hypermedia design history
application. It provides access to a database of
video clips containing stories and personal
perspectives of design team members recorded at
various times during the course of a project. The
system is intended to provide a simple frame-
work for recording and organizing the informal
history and rationale that design teams create
and share in the course of their collaboration.
This article describes 1) the scenarios of use the
authors are trying to support, 2) the methods
they used collecting and organizing the database,
and 3) the status of their prototype.
INTRODUCTION
A team at IBM has been studying the capture,
crafting, and use of various kinds of information that
is,
or can be, produced during the course of the design
process. We want to understand what information is
used in the design process and how the availability and
use of information could be better supported. While
some design tasks may be carried out by individuals,
most commercial system development involves the
coordinated activity of groups of people. Even those
design breakthroughs created by individuals are
explained and worked out
in
groups.
We have observed
that members of design projects sometimes preserve
and exchange informal history and rationale: they
"make" a history and rationale for their project by
telling stories among themselves. This material may
play a variety of roles in the design team's problem
solving and group dynamics. One way to study it is
to collect testimony from design team members. This
testimony provides a view of what information was
available and how it was used. These reports need not
be
restricted
to the
technical aspects of the system being
designed, but can encompass the entire design context,
including organizational and interpersonal issues.
Testimony collected from different persons or from the
same person at different times can be compared and
contrasted to study patterns of consensus, diversity,
and change.
Such information could help us to better support
the design process as well as to better understand it.
A collection of the original designers' renderings of
the history and rationale of their project at various
points in the design evolution might be a useful
resource for further design work, even by that same
team; for developing documentation; for maintenance
and redesign; and for education about the design
process, as a case study.
Alpert and Karat are with the IBM Thomas J.
Watson Research Center, Yorktown
Heights,
New York.
When this article was written, Carroll was manager of
User Interface Theory and Design. Carroll and Rosson
are
now at the
Department of Computer Science, Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg,
Virginia. Van Deusen is now with InterMedia Enterpris-
es,
Wrentham, Massachusetts.
Parts of
this
paper appeared earlier in J.M. Carroll,
S.R. Alpert, J. Karat, M.S. Van Deusen, and
M.B.
Rosson,
"Raison d'Etre: Capturing Design History and Rationale
in Multimedia Narratives," Proceedings of CHI '94: Human
Factors
of
Computing
Systems.
(Boston,
24-28
April 1994).
New York: ACM Press, 192-197. The current version of
Raison d'Etre
is
implemented
on an OS/2
platform in Tool-
Book™ with software extensions to support digital video
from Datalus' MultiMedia DeskTop™. The video was
digitized and is played through IBM's ActionMedia™ II
DVI capture
and
playback
adaptors.
We
would
like to
thank
Jurgen Koenemann and Linn Marks for their comments,
suggestions, and feedback.
— RAISON D'ETRE
—
ISSUE 48
—
12:4 (1994) 59
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