Ixd Masters Thesis II
Title: Collaborative Community Engagement: Developing a framework towards community engagement through an online collaborative drawing platform
The paper can be found on Malmö University Electronic Publishing (MUEP) (3.2MB).
The deliverables/prototypes may also be downloaded/viewed.
Made for the Malmö University Interaction Design Master thesis paper.
Thoughts and findings
In a way this paper was a slight continuation from the previous thesis paper about teamwork with others. This time the framework developed was to apply to remotely collaborative team members, who in turn are interacting with the community userbase (and make up part of them).
The idea was to motivate towards a 'community intervention' which explored workshop evaluations to create mockups and use of a scaffolding structure to encourage both feedback, development and dialogue between all members (as appropriate).
Like the previous paper, the point in creating a framework or foundation helps visualize the issues being experienced and allow for documentation. The documentation would then (ideally) improve current practices and processes, with everyone involved in each dialogue more properly communicating.
In the paper it was still uncertain what these workshop evaluations would amount to, or if there would be results that the community userbase as a whole will finally experience. The conclusion was that, because there was additional discussions, we were therefore able to find engagement from team members.
Showing page summaries from TIMELINE, one of the documentations made to establish a foundation/framework.
Some of the explorations to improve the Feedback page of the website, the layout of the client, and even thoughts concerning implementation of a simple issue tracker.
Reflection
Looking back, and understanding the situation a lot more, a lot of the opportunities were lost due to how late the actual intervention was. The research made still holds relevant points however, especially when it comes to community engagement and the methodology applied. It would definitely serve as an example of a period of time which may be preventable in future with enough experience. Still, it was a thesis paper on the topic of community, and a community which I was personally very involved, passionate and engaged in at the time.
As of recently, iScribble rebranded and reopened under HelloPaint, and has been under different ownership.
The first iteration of TIMELINE with Events, and Future Updates & Suggested Improvement on the right. Then the page summaries as shown earlier. The last screenshot showed some spontaneous exploration with self-injecting content (without a database) into a prototype.
The abstract
The thesis focuses on understanding the relationship between remotely collaborative team members and the community userbase. This is done through a series of experiments where both workshops and interviews led to the development of a framework. The methodology developed melded workshops and interviews together with evaluation and iteration periods in what is called ‘workshop rounds’. Prototypes transitioned into ‘living prototypes’ as they involved an actual set of live users which furthermore required high-fidelity implementation. The framework created established team-to-team communication with considerations for eventual users in an open dialog. Suggestions in different directions towards collaborative contributions completed the efforts of a scaffolding approach. The project is relevant to collaborative media methodology where the case studies constructed understandings in design research on the topic of remote collaboration in community engagement and development.
