Towards a Scientific Collaborative Design Approach: The Construction of a Community Informatics Design Assistance System to Support Communities and Virtual Organizations

Abstract

Collaborative design has become one of the main challenges in several fields of studies, especially social and communication sciences, physics and computer sciences and even biology, architecture and ecosystems of innovation. It is part of the future research program in humanities and digital social sciences. Designers want to create systems where several entities (organizations and individuals) could collaborate to society projects in an autonomous way, on site and in their sphere of respective work. Actually this social design process occurs within the collaborative network framework. Collaborative design seeks to allow collaborators to work in a more efficient way by realizing collaborative actions beyond cultural, disciplinary, geographical and temporal barriers. However, for the system to work, we must configure it in order to meet the needs of social requests and changes. According to Lu et al. (2007), few disciplines have addressed the collaborative design study rigorously, which remains a field of the occult science or black magic. These authors grant we should transform collaborative design in a real discipline, in other words, to take it from black magic practiced by very few people to a rigorous discipline understood by all (Lu et al. 2007). Researches on collaboration found a strong resistance from the determinist philosophical tradition followers, resistance also coming from some misunderstandings created by previous works. We were wondering, for example, how to evaluate the human collaboration as an acquired social dexterity if we cannot study it scientifically. In other words, if we cannot provide mathematical proof of the existence of collaboration, its uniqueness, its stability or convergence properties when collaborative design does not rely on any intellectual substance, in view of the low number of serious studies on collaboration sciences that have been led until here. In this case, how to build a collaborative design that allows to generate and share the knowledge? According to Wenger and Gervais, design does not rely on a simple communication activity:

Here, it is about unifying and coordinating the skills that exist in a practice constellation. The design challenge in organizations is not to find the form of skill that conditions all the others, but at the contrary, to coordinate multiple forms of skills in the organizational learning. (Wenger and Gervais 2005, p. 269)

The present chapter suggests an outline for the creation of the community informatics ecosystem’s design and suggests a few leads and recommendations. It also provides a methodological framework, even a multi-methodological one, to support virtual environments. In other words, it is about experiencing a community information systems design or to present the general architecture of a collaboration software, the “reference design for open collaboration”. The community informatics design assistance system (SADC) is essentially a framework presenting the adjustable design modalities according to the users’ needs. It is the starting point for virtual organizations and communities that wish to implement new collaboration solutions. As an adjustable socio-collaborative platform, the SADC covers both the community informatics design’s scientific bases, the design of virtual communities and the collaboration aspects. It links them in order to facilitate the information circulation and the access to knowledge and bring closer the users’ communities. To a lesser degree, the SADC is also a reference model, a conceptual framework defining a middle ground and a common terminology for communication and a platform prototype of open service, expandable and adaptable for the structuring and integration of all sorts of online activities, socio-technical systems, personalized portals and even all sorts of collaboration platforms like virtual communities or campuses.