In the design process, designers make a wide variety of decisions that are essential to transform a design from a conceptual idea into a concrete solution. Recording and tracking design decisions, a first step to capturing the rationale of the design process, are tasks that until now are considered as cumbersome and too constraining. We used a holistic approach to design, deploy, and verify decision cards; a low threshold tool to capture, externalize, and contextualize design decisions during early stages of the design process. We evaluated the usefulness and validity of decision cards with both novice and expert designers. Our exploration results in valuable insights into how such decision cards are used, into the type of information that practitioners document as design decisions, and highlight the properties that make a recorded decision useful for supporting awareness and traceability on the design process.

Current digital design tools that have a high connectivity offer a wide range of possibilities for both co-located and remote collaborative design activities. However, from the point of view of conventional collaborative design practices we identified with practitioners and design companies, these tools lack integrated and comprehensive support during the ideation phase. Consequently, we propose a reference framework with solutions for supporting collaboration among professional designers with digital tools in the early stages of design.

Design activities associated to the ideation phase of design processes require mutual understanding and clear communication based on artefacts. However, this is often a challenge for remote and multidisciplinary teams due to the lack of ad hoc tools for this purpose. Our approach is to solve these limitations by explicitly connecting pieces of information related to design rationale, feedback, and evolution with the artefacts that are subject of communication. We propose Helaba, a system that creates a shared workspace to support communication revolving around design artefacts and activities within multidisciplinary teams. Helaba supports design communication and rationale, and potentially leads to more satisfying outcomes from the design process.

Previous research has proposed guidelines for creating domain-specific languages for modeling human-machine multimodal dialogs. One of these guidelines suggests the use of multiple levels of abstraction so that the descriptions of multimodal events can be separated from the human-machine dialog model. In line with this guideline, we implemented Hasselt, a domain-specific language that combines textual and visual models, each of them aiming at describing different aspects of the intended dialog system. We conducted a user study to measure whether the proposed language provides benefits over equivalent event-callback code. During the user study participants had to modify the Hasselt models and the equivalent C# code. The completion times obtained for C# were on average shorter, although the difference was not statiscally significant. Subjective responses were collected using standardized questionnaires and an interview, which both indicated that participants saw value in the proposed models. We provide possible explanations for the results and discuss some lessons learned regarding the design of the empirical study.