A Case of Dialogues: Virtual Platform

By Thomas Leerberg, Cand. Arch. et PhD
Associate Professor, Designskolen Kolding

In the spring of 2006 Designskolen Kolding took the first step to create a virtual platform for design dialogue.(1) Dialogue has for long been an integrated part of the schools activities and education, with projects in China, England, Holland, India, USA and the Nordic countries. The issue of dialogue has become one of the most important qualifications that students carry on from the school to their professional life. Students and teachers from Designskolen Kolding have for at number of years produced tool for distributed design methods and dialogue. Many of these projects have been constructed in a Flash 8 environment, which is also the platform chosen for this project.

The challenge of Virtual Platform was to create a way for virtual teams to work together without ever meeting in the real world. We wanted to develop a new virtual design tool, which makes it possible for designers to work together across borders, time zones, cultures, languages and economy. Such a broad tool should both consist of a design method, a strategy for design development and a distributed network based environment. We recognized that the design process today is conducted via a wide range of media and technologies. Few of these media are designed for designers and most of them lack a shared terminology, so the challenge was also to provide the look and feel of a traditional design method, where the designer can feel the materials, have his favorite tools and the spontaneous inspiration.


Illustration: The interface of Virtual Platform

The project was concerned with three problems that face virtual teams today:
  1. That the creative process is carried out through a diverse range of digital media, which are not or only poorly integrated
  2. That the digital tools used by virtual teams are not designed for that specific purpose but used in a very pragmatic way, which often limits the creative efficiency and
  3. That virtual teams need a shared terminology for the design process.
The research problem was therefore; to integrate media, to develop dedicated design tools and to construct a shared terminology for communication. The platform had a broad range, providing a distributed design dialogue for students, teachers, researchers and professionals.

The two main focal points of the project were therefore the integration of media (mobile phones, laptop, pda, workstations etc.) and the construction of a shared design method. Further focal points were notification of events in the communities created on the platform, history and the possibility of replaying a transparent design process (‘Reality Process’) and space as a shared terminology for the interaction and navigation.

The space of Virtual Platform must be seen at a conceptual level – as a design space for exchange and communication. So in essence the spatial environment was created to provide the users and teams with an ability to qualify their presence and related artifacts. This points at least in two directions: a) the ability to customize the specific workspace and thereby qualify an individual view on the other team members to get a more personal feel of the interaction and b) to provide the users in general with one more dimension in order to better organize and structure the process-path.

As the concept of design is expanding from a traditional view of an aesthetic preparation of industrial production to entail a wide range of structuring and planning activities in anthropology, economics and human resource management it defines a new therapeutic role for the designer, who has to be a ‘go-between’ that makes the whole integration work, it also creates new products of design, new design disciplines and new ways of working that has not yet been experienced.(2) We could see virtual teams in the spatial construct of operands, even as an economy of information – as an intricate exchange of information, experience, expertise, opinions and ideas to serve the higher purpose of adding value to a shared enterprise.

As described above, the Virtual Platform is primarily a tool for communication and dialogue. It offers the designer a range of tools, which will make it possible to bridge differences in place, time, language, technology and culture – and keep a design dialogue going. The platform has a procedure for letting students use the tools:
  1. First step is to create a profile with information and statements about the workshop themes. The user will have to provide a valid email address and will receive a password with a link to the login page. All this is explained as the user goes along.
  2. The profiles that new users have created will be accessible to other users so they can find people they want to work with.
  3. Each user has a private workspace, where they can invite other users to join. The workspace consists of different tools for communication and sketching.
  4. When a project is finished, the user will sign off by uploading works and comments to a weblog archives by using the same username and password as provided in creating the user profiles.
The platform has also a defined set of options that are given to each member of a virtual team or to the virtual team as a group:

A. Profile environment
    1. to create a personal profile with data, take on issues and images of own works
    2. to receive a password by mail to log in to the platform
    3. to browse other users profiles (list of user profiles)
    4. to comment on other users profiles (public notes, chat format?)
    5. to establish contact with other users
    6. to set up a team, agree on the task, establish leadership and proceed to a session
B. Log-in environment
    1. to get access to the platform
    2. to be appointed/create a session
    3. to assume ownership of that session
    4. to invite other users to join session (list of user names in database)
    5. to control who has the right to enter which sessions
    6. to get an overview of the activity on the platform (logged-in users in sessions)
    7. to provide user statistics
C. Session environment
    1. to establish a design dialogue with other users
    2. to sketch ideas and share them with others
    3. to communicate through different means respective of bandwidth/technology
    4. to share digital work created outside the platform (upload and browse)
    5. to invite input from other users or keep the session private (number of users)
    6. to create an overview of the design process in time (browse through snapshots)
    7. to show non-verbal emotions to other users work (icons)
    8. to finalize a session and upload the results for publication (upload, reset session)
D. Gallery environment
    1. to browse the products that the users choose to publish
1 A new product of design could easily be a design process to be used by other designers as a rule or a manual, as it was the case with MVRDV’s FARMAX project.
2 The application TOPOS was one of the results of the research project ‘WorkSpace’ that the author took part in, which was a joint group of The Aarhus School of Architecture, The Department of Experimental Computer science at University of Aarhus, and Sociological Studies at Lancaster University. See http://www.daimi.au.dk/workspace/index.htm.

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