· · · Institutional Repository

The demands for the quality and scale of videogames have become so high in the last few years, that game studios are having increasing difficulties meeting them, unless the development process is changed. The goals of this project are to create a platform aimed at supporting a new iterative game development paradigm, improving collaboration within studios, automating trivial tasks, supporting project management and improving the overall workflow. The solution we came up with is a framework that has a modular design and was built with usability in mind. Different components are created to facilitate the different goals for this platform. Together, these components form a solid framework to further build the Cannibal Game Development Platform on.

This report shows the development of a tool, which will enable designers to start collaborative design projects. The project is executed at the company Veeel, a design agency in Amsterdam. Veeel has brought together a large pool of designers on their online platform Designrider, which gives them access to a wealth of technical knowledge, experience, skills and creativity. The designers can enrol for projects provided by Veeel on Designrider. However, the designers wait until a project is placed, they do not interact with each other in the meantime. This can lead to missed opportunities. It is important for designers to build a strong network, which they can use in their search for projects. A dynamic network will aid them in achieving larger projects, which is difficult for an individual designer and enables the designer to do what they do best. Therefore, designers should be supported in becoming more active on Designrider to start collaborative design projects. These findings have lead to developing a tool that changes the wait and see attitude of the designers in Designrider. In the analysis phase, social networks, communities and the importance of building trust among each other before sharing information with new connections are investigated. The insights from this literature study are used as a base to research and understand the current situation of Veeel, Designrider and the designers. It became clear that it is not only about providing design projects but designers are searching for something else as well. Designrider is lacking three needs to strengthen the ties in ones network, namely projects, triggers and social communication. The outcomes of the analysis were transformed into a design vision. The design vision suggests that the designers need to feel confident enough to show their potential and should help each other during their design process. These insights were translated into an interaction vision, which explains the intended interaction of the to be developed tool. The design vision forms a framework for the conceptualization part of the project where all the gained information is translated into different ideas. The generated ideas were tested in two different user studies both offline and online. The insights of the user studies have led to the development of a concept idea for the tool. The tool supports designers to share their process with other designers in different steps. A designer can start up a new project; others can become interested and start following the project after being accepted. They will be more involved in the project. Updates of the project will keep the rest of the designers involved. When the designer who started a new project needs help, he or she can turn to his followers or an expert. The final result will be visible for all the designers of Designrider when a project is finished. When the project is really interesting, Veeel could invite a designer for the event DesignerDrinks. At this event, the invited designer can present his or her project. The others can become interested, inspired and during a drink they can get more connected to each other. Although further research is needed, it can be concluded that the designers will feel more confident showing their potential if they can control who sees their process. This will change the wait and see attitude of the designers. The new tool supports the three needs: projects, triggers and social communication, both online and offline. The triggers are initiated by the start of a new project. The new project and its updates initiate conversations and enables starting collaboration. Due to the collaborative design projects, weak ties become strong. This will build trust, connections will appear and information streams will be possible. Finally, a recommendation to Veeel is made. As a start, Veeel should change the proposition of Designrider. Instead of providing a platform where designers can find projects it should be “Expose, share, start collaborative design projects and become part of a dedicated community of designers.”

Today, engineering systems offer a variety of local and webbased applications to support collaboration by assisting groups in structuring activities, generating and sharing data, and improving group communication. To ensure the quality of collaboration, engineering system design needs to analyze and define possible collaboration processes. Currently, engineering system design focuses on collaboration processes in a static environment. However, today’s world is characterized by dynamic environments that can influence the requirements of a collaboration process and require to adapt the process during runtime. This paper introduces a new approach for engineering systems design that provides adaptive collaboration support for changing environments. This approach is based upon a conceptual architecture for engineering systems that uses data streams to analyze the dynamic environment and adapts a collaboration process on demand according to varying goals, time and data.

This MSc research intends to use modelling method to represent collaboration system and develop improvement suggestions. The represented collaboration system is under the background of concurrent design process in ESA design projects. The whole research can be mainly separated into three parts. The first part is related to explore suitable collaboration model to represent collaboration system. The outcome of the first research part is the FRMC. The second part is related to use BPMN2.0 to represent the collaboration system in concurrent design process of ESA projects. The outcomes of the second research part are BPMN2.0 collaboration model and the argument about whether BPMN2.0 can effectively represent the collaboration in concurrent design process. The third part is related to the utility of collaboration models. The outcome of the third research part is improvement suggestions to the collaboration system in concurrent design process of ESA projects regarding to its current collaboration challenges and collaboration modelling results.

This report describes the design of a tool for online art collaboration; a virtual workplace for New Media art. The project is executed under the authority of the TU Delft, at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, as part of the master Design for Interaction. The client is Born Digital, an organization that supports collaborations between New Media artists both within a national and an international network. Key-points of both the virtual and physical ways in which Born Digital manifests itself are the creation of art, the sharing of knowledge and creativity, and the development of a multidisciplinary network. The term New Media art refers to art that is created by using new media technology, and encompasses a great number of artists and disciplines. The focus of this graduation assignment is limited to the creation of static visual art, created for commercial or educational purposes. Disciplines that are related to this assignment are graphic design, illustration, photography, typography, cartoons and any other possible art forms that involve image manipulation. As a means to explore the world of the New Media artist, interviews were conducted. The goal of this approach was to gain understanding in the thoughts, considerations and actions of the potential users of the online platform. Also, the web-based project management tools Huddle and Basecamp were examined. Their features were investigated and compared to the intended functionality of the Born Digital platform. An analysis of the version control system Subversion showed how this software is able to streamline and organize files in a collaborative project that is executed online. In differently setup user tests, user behavior was observed and analyzed. Step by step, improvements were made to a prototype. The conclusions of the of the target group analysis and the investigation of existing technology, as well as the outcomes of the user tests, were used to state a list of design requirements. This list served as a basis for the design of an interface of the platform. Finally, a last user test was executed to validate the design. The graduation projected resulted in a concept for a web-based tool for the collaborative creation of static visual art. It is designed in such a way that it smoothly and intuitively guides its users through the intended interactions, meanwhile inspiring them and motivating them into participation. In this virtual environment, New Media artists have the opportunity of starting new and innovative collaborations.

Hangar 36 is part of the Bink 36 complex that is owned by Vestia. Some entrepreneurs see the potential of a group of multi-disciplined, talented and creative entrepreneurs in one location and are interested in structurally benefit from this potential. Every company in Hangar 36 is successful in its own market, but initiating and participating in collaborative projects lost its relevance to most of the entrepreneurs. This project investigates the possibilities for Hangar 36 and answers the question: How can the entrepreneurs in Hangar 36 structurally benefit from their presence in a spatial cluster which is shared by a group of multi-disciplinary, talented and creative entrepreneurs? First an analysis is performed that investigated theory on the origin of spatial clusters, collaborative entrepreneurship (Ribeiro-Soriano & Urbano, 2009) and communities of practice (Akkermans, Petter & de Laat, 2008; Wenger, 1998). It was found that relevance towards collaboration and a sense of belonging to the group are two very important aspects that have to receive enough attention before thinking about coordination and organization. This is described as engaging in meaningful and shared activities (Akkermans et al., 2008). The current situation in Hangar 36 was analyzed by interviewing every entrepreneur on a number of topics. It was found that collaboration was considered important, but past attempts were considered irrelevant by a number of entrepreneurs after a while. A number of examples of collaborative clusters have been visited. The two factors that found to influence the difference in collaborative activity within a spatial cluster the most are the clusters’ primary goals and the level of management within the cluster. This results in the classification of four types of clusters: Facilitator, Incubator, Collective and Accumulator. It was found that the original intention from Hangar 36 did not thrive because it tried to fit too many different categories at the same time. In the current situation Hangar 36 is classified as an accumulator. The visited examples served as a source of inspiration for opportunities for Hangar 36. A set of criteria is composed from the strengths and bottlenecks found in the interviews. Combining these criteria transforms these opportunities into 5 diverging concept directions. The concepts were presented to the entrepreneurs during a lunch session that included a group discussion with the purpose to find out which aspects are perceived as relevant in terms of collaboration. The outcome of the discussion was converged and summarized in the following mentality. Hangar 36 should be an engine for the participating businesses. Potential clients should know the name, and the location should attract clients as well. Any activity that distracts too much from executing core business activities is not appreciated at this point. This mentality was the starting point for diverging into a second round of idea generation. The mentality is transformed in two separate questions. The ideas take the set of criteria that have been derived earlier into account and were designed to be practical, implementable and affordable on a small budget. The second gathering was in the form of a creative session. The entrepreneurs picked their favorite ideas and supplemented and improved them. Furthermore, they have identified the required tasks for implementation and the steps that contain these tasks. The ideas were accommodated with a catchy title by the entrepreneurs and presented to each other. A roadmap describes how this project could have an impact on the further development of Hangar 36 on an abstract level, by cycling through the dimensions of communities of practice (as defined by Wenger, 1998). The ideas from the second session were digitalized and combined in the form of an idea catalog. The digital versions of the ideas are also contained in this report. The catalog was printed and presented to Hangar 36 as a means to physically take the ideas to the next meetings.

The present study investigates the influence of common sketches on the idea generation process in early concept generation. Thirty-six teams of three design students were given a small task in which they were asked to come up with visualized ideas. In the control groups, team members sketched on an individual sheet of paper while working in a team. As expected , the teams sketching individually produced more in total and more diverse ideas. No difference was found between the quality and innovativeness of the ideas. Also according to the hypotheses, individually sketching teams elaborated less on their ideas and explained their own ideas more. THe teams did not differ in their satisfaction with the final result. The result suggest that common sketching did serve as a common ground in the group that leads to shared views and ideas. This, however, goes along with less productivity of ideas.

In recent years, a lot of initiatives were taken to improve the collaboration between actors in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry. ‘Integration’ seems to be amongst the most used aims to enhance collaboration in these initiatives. To achieve integration, one might distinguish between integration of process and product. This paper reports a quantitative study into the relationship between process requirements based on the collaborative design process and the level of integration of the architectural and climate design of a building. This study continues previous work of Prins and Kruijne (2011). Their definition of design integration is reformulated and their set of twelve criteria has been re-examined and adapted. This research provides evidence as of how to operationalize integration, as a ‘soft’ architectural quality. Through a questionnaire the design process of 168 projects was analysed focusing on several process requirements in terms of intensity of collaboration and the very nature of the collaboration of architects and climate installation engineers. Using logistic regression modelling, three process requirements (i.e. the moment of involvement of the engineer during the project, the architect as project manager during the initiative phase, and the ambition of the client) were found to significantly explain the level of integration of the architectural and climate installation design of projects. These requirements emphasise the importance of the initiative phase of the project in relation to the finally obtained level of product integration.

This Master thesis is the result of a research project in Vietnam. The goal of this project is to design a tool that will help Vietnamese SMEs initiate collaboration (plans) that fit their situation, position, culture and desires. These partnerships could be initiated for various reasons, but will mainly be aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of company strategies and business operation. The purpose of the project is not to prescribe a strategy, but to offer them some guidance and support in the start-up phase of the collaboration development process. The result is COLLABO; a tool facilitating discussions and interaction to increase its users’ understanding and trust on several aspects regarding collaboration.

Collaboration is often presented as the solution to numerous problems in business and society. However, collaboration is challenging, and collaboration support is not an off-the-shelf-product. This research offers theoretical foundations for Collaboration Engineering. Collaboration Engineering is an approach to design and deploy high value recurring collaborative work practices that can be transferred to practitioners to execute for themselves without ongoing support from (external) professionals. We present a theory on the quality of a collaboration process design for Collaboration Engineering and offer support to design and transfer such process designs. Evaluating the supporting concepts, we found that practitioners that facilitated collaboration processes could achieve similar quality as professional facilitators. Our design approach, theory, and collaboration process building blocks (called thinkLets) can be used to develop new collaboration support systems, and can be used to transfer collaboration support skills. ThinkLets also offer a framework for research on patterns of collaboration at a higher level of detail, which will allow us to gain new insights in predictable, effective and efficient tools and techniques for collaboration support.

The high cost of an electron microscope makes remote collaboration a sure-fire way of increasing the operational efficiency of this type of equipment. A pathologist can now be consulted from a remote location by the microscopist, and a manager at a steel plant can discuss a problem with the researcher at a metallurgical institute, with both participants watching the same image and being able to manipulate the microscope samples.

Fast product follow-ups and increasing customer demands have changed product design from a rather unstructured process, into a systematic activity. Nowadays, both companies and researchers have developed the organizational aspects of integrated product design. However, attention to the collaborative aspects lags behind the structural and organizational aspects. The aim of this study was gaining a better understanding of the collaborative processes of actors from different disciplines during the product design process in industry. We called this process collaborative design. Collaborative design consists of three building blocks: - knowledge creation and -integration between actors from different disciplines - communication between the actors about both the design content and the design process - the creation of shared understanding about the subjects communicated In this thesis, we focused on the third building block: the process of creating shared understanding between different disciplines about the design they were making. During empirical case study research in industry, we investigated what factors influence the creation of shared understanding between actors in collaborative design projects. Additionally, we examined the collaborative mechanisms that occur in these projects. Collaborative mechanisms describe what influence the factors found have on the creation of shared understanding have on the three building blocks of collaborative design. The results of thesis form a significant step towards a better understanding of collaborative design processes in industry.

Unavailability of technical systems, such as aircraft, is expensive. Technical systems require maintenance to prevent and to remedy defects that cause unavailability. Users of technical systems usually bear the consequences of the risk of unavailability, in particular the loss of productivity. This is based on the presumption that users are best able to insure the risks, although maintenance organisations may be more capable to mitigate the risks. The risks are seldom allocated to maintenance organisations because users and maintenance organisations tend to have conflicting objectives. This raises the questions if a maintenance organisation can be motivated to pursue the objective of the user. This would be possible if the maintenance organisation is rewarded for the “commercial success of the user of the technical system”. If the maintenance organisation indeed pursues the objective of the user of the technical system, the maintenance organisation can make autonomous decisions about the maintenance activities. And if the maintenance organisation can make decisions, it can make investments in measures to mitigate risks, knowing that it can decide if these measures will be employed. This research shows that it is efficient and effective to transfer the risks of the unavailability of a technical system from the user to the maintenance organisation on the condition that the maintenance organisation (a) will be compensated for the risks of unavailability, (b) will be rewarded for the contribution of the technical system to the commercial success of the user, and (c) is assigned the required decision rights. This will in practice require new “collaborative” contracts that can be used for the supply of long-term maintenance services of technical systems where unavailability causes a significant economic risk, for example in aircraft maintenance.

Today in many of our neighbouring countries ‘working together in integrated project teams’, using groupware and BIM, is the future way of process thinking in the building practice. Everyone is convinced that ‘teams outperform individuals’! Especially when diverse skills, judgement and experiences can enhance the project’s outcome. This paper contains the first phase of a comparative study of IPD processes, ways of enhanced collaboration and communication between the different stakeholders in the supply chain of projects abroad, to solve the problems occurring in traditional construction processes used in Belgium. Before the search for solutions can start several questions need an answer first. ‘Which types of building processes are being applied in Belgium today? From which problems do stakeholders suffer? Do all stakeholders understand the problems? Why do Belgians keep following these traditional processes? Are they already aware of the progress in innovative processes made in our neighbouring countries? Is there economical, professional, legal or political support for them?’

Organizations increasingly use collaborative teams in order to create value for their stakeholders. This trend has given rise to a new research field: Collaboration Engineering. The goal of Collaboration Engineering is to design and deploy processes for high-value recurring collaborative tasks, and to design these processes such that practitioners can execute them successfully without the intervention of professional facilitators. One of the key concepts in Collaboration Engineering is the thinkLet – a codified facilitation technique that creates a predictable pattern of collaboration. Because thinkLets produce a predictable pattern of interactions among people working together toward a goal they can be used as snap-together building blocks for team process designs. This paper presents an analysis of the thinkLet concept and proposes a conceptual object model of a thinkLet that may inform further developments in Collaboration Engineering.

To solve complex problems brainstorming with a Group Support System can be a helpful tool. Social comparison and association effects are factors that stimulate the generation of creative and high quality ideas or concepts. Also, the GSS’ capabilities that allow a group to work in parallel contributes to the swiftness with which a fast growing set of ideas is generated. Groups of 10 to 15 are able to produce 100 to 150 ideas in as little as 15 minutes. The set of generated ideas however also has some limitations. Typically the set of ideas is characterized by redundancy, ambiguity, off-topic ideas and a lack of shared understanding. Extracting the key ideas from such a large set of ideas is time consuming and easily cause the facilitator and participants to suffer from cognitive overload. Extracting the key ideas is a process in which the group uses a combination of selecting and summarizing ideas and uses clarification techniques to create shared understanding. To address these challenges, groups and facilitators can benefit from methods and techniques to effectively extract the key ideas from the brainstormed list of ideas, without losing any promising ideas. Such techniques and methods are typically referred to as convergence methods. In interviews with professional facilitators we indeed found that they considered convergence to be difficult and time consuming. Also a large body of literature, mainly GSS case studies, was found that describes hurdles to convergence. These hurdles include (1) information overload at the beginning of a convergence task and (2) the cognitive effort required to complete a convergence task. Therefore the main research question of this thesis is: ‘how can convergence processes become more successful and effective?’. Based on an analysis of the current set of methods for convergence we identified four opportunities to improve the successfulness and effectiveness of a convergence process. The methods included in this study originate from the ThinkLet library, the method database of the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) and from a literature review. The identified opportunities are: • Removing the task of detecting redundant concepts away from the facilitator to lower his/her workload. • Improving the current hurdles that exist when converging in a parallel way, as is done is the FocusBuilder thinkLet among others. The current limitations of this thinkLet include: o Lack of comprehensiveness of the end result o Inability for the facilitator to monitor the process • Creating a scalable and fast pre-selection method. • Improving support for inexperienced facilitators to manage a convergence process in a large group. Classifying and comparing the methods found was possible by using a classification scheme based on two axes, (1) the output of a method and (2) the way of working implied by a method. By using the example of a creative problem solving workshop, in which we tried to find a match between a method for convergence and a convergence task for different scenarios, we have identified the opportunities for improvement. The differences in the scenarios were in the number of participants and facilitator skill level. In response to these opportunities we have designed three artefacts. One new thinkLet, Divide&Conquer, is developed that enables large groups to quickly make a pre selection of concepts. Secondly we designed a modifier to the FocusBuilder thinkLet. This thinkLet supports the creation of shared understanding, achieves a reduction of the concepts under consideration and removes redundant concepts from a brainstorm artefact in a scalable and fast way. Thirdly a technique for similarity detection, normally used for plagiarism detection and automatic grading of written texts, is adapted and evaluated for use to detect redundant concepts in a brainstorm or convergence artefact. The technique uses normalized vector representations of concepts based on a thesaurus to detect similar concepts. To assess the effectiveness and success of the designed artefacts the following process and result oriented metrics are used; process oriented: acceptance, satisfaction, facilitator dependence, scalability, commitment, productivity and efficiency. Result oriented: speed, redundancy, reduction, refinement, comprehensiveness, shared understanding (ambiguity), satisfaction and commitment. Evaluation in groups of the technique for similarity detection, the new Divide&Conquer thinkLet and the modified FocusBuilder thinkLet revealed that: • Even with a moderate detection rate of 50% participants are able to remove redundant concepts faster than participants that did not use the artefact in which concepts were ordered according to the automatic detected redundancies. Evaluation however is limited to one case study. Further evaluation is needed to validate the results and research the use of similarity detection within the new and other thinkLets. • The Divide&Conquer thinkLet can be used within groups to quickly make a pre-selection of concepts that the group deems worthy of paying further attention to. The process and results of the thinkLet were accepted by the participants of two workshops, however the process needs thorough explanation before the start to reach agreement on the process. The thinkLet achieves a pre-selection quicker than other pre-selection methods because in principal less votes than the number of participants are collected per concept. Based on the average value and standard deviation it is decided whether more votes per concept are needed. This increases speed and therefore scalability of the pre-selection process. The pre-selections made in the evaluation workshops with this thinkLet contained only on-topic items and reduced the original brainstorm artefact by 50% on average with a standard deviation of 10%. Besides explaining the process and presenting the results no facilitator efforts are required. • The modified FocusBuilder thinkLet can be used on a brainstorm artefact directly or after a pre selection has been made. The thinkLet fosters the creation of shared understanding and achieves a (further) reduction in the number of concepts under consideration by removing and summarizing redundant concepts and removing off-topic concepts. The thinkLet uses sub groups of participants that work on sub sets of concepts in parallel and convergence is achieved in three or four rounds. In previous case studies the comprehensiveness of the end result was too low. We removed the first round from the thinkLet, in which the participants work alone, to limit participant bias. Evaluation revealed that the comprehensiveness of the end result increased, without changing any other values that already were positive. Because of the parallel way of working the thinkLet is fast and scalable. Facilitator interventions are needed to explain the process and to present the end result, the real convergence effort is executed by the participants, therefore facilitator dependence of this thinkLet is low. The inability for the facilitator to monitor the process also is an opportunity for improvement of this thinkLet. A design for this is described, but is not evaluated. The outcome of this project is relevant for every professional interested in efficient collaboration within his project team, business unit or organisation. But also for practitioners, facilitators and collaboration engineers, because it proposes solutions for the time consuming step of convergence in GSS supported meetings. Further effort is however needed to evaluate the performance of the two thinkLets within more workshops, but the results indicate that the field of evaluation can be extended to organizations and professionals. Further research is needed to improve the accuracy of detection of redundant concepts and to integrate the detection technique within the two thinkLets mentioned.

The present study was aimed at comparing traditional input using keyboard and mouse to the direct stylus input for 9 to 11 years old children in a Brazilian (N=48) and a Dutch (N=48) primary school. The ultimate goal was to improve child education with the aid of computers. A structured experiment was designed and performed to empirically acquire measurements of collaboration, usability, and learning. The children did a pointing, text-entry and drawing task using both input methods. The task itself was based on recognizing emotions in photographs of faces. Self-report methods were used to inquire preference, ease-of-use, enjoyment, and effectiveness. Automatic logging was done to obtain performance data in terms of task scores and interaction duration. Video recordings were annotated to get behavioral information of arousal, valence, cooperation, and attention. Within-subjects significance tests were used to analyze the collected data for usability and collaboration differences. Between-subjects significance tests were applied to study differences in learning. The traditional input devices were more effective, but the stylus yielded higher satisfaction. Efficiency depended on the location and the input task. Location further also affected the intensity of the other usability findings. Based on the results, a theory was posed that the stylus brings forth a more playful attitude, compared to a more formal stance with traditional input devices. No difference between the stylus and traditional devices was found with respect to learning or collaboration. With the findings, organizations that consider using stylus input for children in educational settings may better understand the implications of their decision. The primary decision revolves around the relative importance of effectiveness and satisfaction.