Brief Encounters Network: Exploring New Forms of Online Collaborative Design

Brief Encounters Network: Exploring New Forms of Online Collaborative Design

We are living in a global economy where international and inter disciplinary collaboration is increasingly important. This research network will explore the potential for new and emerging technologies to better support collaborative Design processes. The network will bring together participants from a range of different backgrounds including product design, interaction and service design, graphic design ethnography, marketing, engineering, psychology and computer science in two workshops with both physical and virtual participants. Prior to the workshops, participants will contribute to a mapping exercise highlighting their current use of communication tools and processes. This will be used to inform and compare their current and ideal/future use of tools identified in the workshop. The participants will be sorted into teams including at least one remote online participant and challenged to address a "brief" to develop a new tool for collaboration. The teams will engage in concept design, sketching and scenario development to outline what the tool might look like. The teams will then critique one another's ideas in order to refine and reiterate the designs. This process may well produce innovative ideas which could be pursued in future research, but perhaps more importantly it will generate insights into what current practices are and how they might be improved. The workshops will be recorded by a documentary film maker. The film will be a resource for understanding interdisciplinary and international remote collaboration. It will also be edited into a short film for dissemination on video sharing websites such as YouTube and Vimeo.

The beneficiaries of this research network will be researchers, educators, practitioners and policy makers within the design community and other relevant communities such as engineering, business, marketing and social science. The Brief Encounters Network includes participants from the listed areas.

Inviting the intended end users, including designers from large transnational consumer companies and design service consultancies, to actively participate during the exploration activities of the network will enable the network to achieve impacts of the research beyond academia. In addition the network includes members from organisation that design digital tools, which are used by designers during the NPD. It also includes representatives from national government and professional bodies such as the Design Council and the Charted Institute of Designers.

The planned dissemination strategies for work in progress and the final network outputs have been planned to increase the likelihood of achieving the stated impacts by:
- Targeting professional design publications both circulated in print and online (see Case for Support document)
- Publicising the workshop activities using Web 2.0 communication channels such as LinkedIn, Vimeo and on a Blog (through WordPress)
- Disseminating via professional 'Engineering Designer' which is a bi-monthly journal produced by the Institution of Engineering Designers (IED, is the project support partner)
- Through the running of the second workshop as part of the international conference Design 2012 which is be also attended by delegates from beyond academia
- Network members disseminating the outputs within their own professional networks

The proposed research will be managed to engage users and beneficiaries that have been identified by implementing the following strategies:
- Two workshops that will generate a map of current practice and a number of exploratory and experimental multidisciplinary responses to the brief
- Visual documentation of the outcomes emerging from the workshops (e.g. documentary films which will be made available on Vimeo and YouTube.
- A dedicated website for the research network that will facilitate sharing of material.
- A rich network that spans disciplinary, conceptual, and methodological boundaries.
- A future, larger following programme of work aimed at fundamental research of the major themes identified throughout the course of this project.

In addition, a variety of channels will be used to publicise workshop activities to disseminate its outputs in order to increase the impact of the work beyond the network's participants. These will include:
- Journal articles featuring the proposed work, as well as outcomes from the Network will be targeted at professional magazines such as: newdesign, I.D., Icon, Curve, Blueprint, Engineering Designer and Design Week; online magazines such as Core77, Develp3D, David Report and design exchange Magazine; and blogs such as New Media Monthly
- A Network Report and Project booklet outlining the Network's activities will be disseminated through social publishing sites issuu and Scribd and social dissemination sites such as Academia and Research Gate
- Running the second network workshop at the 12th International Design 2012 international conference which will enable its activities to be disseminated during the network lifetime at international scientific forum
- Publicised and disseminated Network events, activities and the outputs through: online newsletters such as Design Research News which is circulated to close to 9,000 subscribers, Designophy and Dexigner with more than 300,000 impressions/month; and electronic discussion forums such as PhD-Design, IDForum, ADM-HEA and Linkedin groups such as Design Research which has more than 10,000 members.
- Journal and international conference articles based on the data and knowledge gained during the network's proposed activities