SmartBoards is a research project in development that extends the functionalities of popular digital whiteboarding platforms like Miro by extracting design information as data and performing various useful automations on them. The goal of the project is to better support online participatory design activities at scale.
This work has been accepted as a workshop at San Diego Design Week and was submitted as a demo paper at ACM UIST 2021, where I was 2nd author. I’m currently working with the team to submit a full paper (and potentially a pictorial) to ACM DIS 2022 in June.
Starting Fall 2021, I’m taking a project manager role and leading a team of undergrad devs to implement better progress tracking features for the SmartBoards project. Would love to chat more if interested!
<aside> 💡 Provide recommendations on related problems and solutions based on current ideas
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<aside> 💪 Strengthen cross-team collaboration by facilitating feedback across design teams working on identical activities
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<aside> 📊 Aggregate design information by providing teams with tools to summarize and visualize design artifacts, even across whiteboards
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Design teams will be able to carry out all of these activities within Miro boards and with minimal seamful interaction with other platforms or webpages
Existing whiteboarding solutions include Mural, Miro, and Lucidchart
Participatory design workshops have the potential to democratize the design process by integrating diverse perspectives from a community. By engaging participants with structured design activities, these workshops bring people together in a shared environment to exchange ideas, discuss tradeoffs, and make decisions. However, face-to-face design workshops can be messy and ephemeral. During COVID-19, these workshops are increasingly being conducted online, which offer some additional benefits such as having a persistent history of design activities and real-time & scalable collaboration.
To support these online design workshops, facilitators are turning to digital whiteboards like Miro, Mural, and Lucidchart. These whiteboards largely replicate in-person design activities using the metaphor of a whiteboard and post-it notes. There’s opportunity to capitalize on computing for automatic data collection, processing, and recommendation to adapting template scaffolds. This is especially valuable for participatory design workshops where participants come from diverse backgrounds and design skill levels.
<aside> ❓ How might we overcome existing obstacles of online participatory design workshops, particularly for design novices, such as idea fixation, blank canvas, and siloed perspectives to make sessions more productive, collaborative, and informative?
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