From the Publisher: The design of computer systems capable of understanding and effectively meeting human needs is of great importance to our economy and well-being. It is generally agreed by those who have studied design that we can greatly improve the ultimate systems by improving the way we go about designing them. Researchers and practitioners in a variety of fields have been involved in this effort. The concept of design rationale, the why of designing, has emerged as a key to making design processes more intelligible and easier to deal with. Design rationale refers broadly to issues in the methods, documentation, and communication of design thinking. This book offers the most comprehensive account to date on research into design rationale. The authors report on leading-edge theory and empirical studies of the nature and use of design rationale. They also describe the significance of design rationale for creating design tools and for teaching designers. Finally, they discuss the nature of system design and the use of design rationale in real design settings in industry.

The School of Medicine, TCD (Trinity College Dublin) has developed the undergraduate degree in Medicine in accordance with the Medical Council and the World Federation of Medical Education guidelines. The course is 5 years. At TCD, clinical and theoretical aspects of psychiatry for 4th-year medical students are delivered during a two-month attachment. Four days of the two months are allocated exclusively to Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (CAP), and up to ¼ of all students do a two-weekspeciality clinical rotation in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. A team of academic child and adolescent psychiatrists at TCD developed the structure and content of the PBL-based component of the program for CAP. The introduced PBL into the curriculum was received positively by the students; PBL was well liked, stimulating and preferred, especially by those interested in psychiatry as a career.

The success of social computing has generated a host of workplace collaboration tools. However, adoption of these tools by entire groups is a major problem. One reason for the adoption problem is a lack of methods for considering collaborative groups in technology design. Even when designing collaboration tools, designers often employ methods that focus on individuals. This leads to tools that are not well targeted at the groups who will use them. To solve this problem, we propose the notion of collaboration personas, which are empirically derived descriptions of hypothetical groups, including details that inform the design of collaboration tools. Collaboration personas differ from individual personas in having (1) multiple, inter-related individuals playing specific roles; (2) a focus on collective goals and elaboration of individual goals that affect the collective goal; and (3) new attributes that characterize collaborative aspects of the group's work. We contrast collaboration personas with other design approaches and provide examples of how they can be used to design new collaborative tools that better meet the needs of typical groups.

We developed DataBoard, a freeform spatial interface, to support users in simple problem solving tasks. To develop a deeper understanding of the role of space and the tradeoffs between freeform and structured interaction styles in problem solving tasks, we conducted a controlled user study comparing the DataBoard with a spreadsheet and analyzed video data in detail. Beyond improvements in task performance and memory recall, our observations reveal that freeform interfaces can support users in a variety of ways: representing problems flexibly, developing strategies, executing strategies incrementally, tracking problem state easily, reducing mental computation, and verifying solutions perceptually. The spreadsheet also had advantages, and we discuss the tradeoffs.

Work organization and team membership is highly complex for modern workers. Teams are often dynamic as personnel change during a project. Dynamic team members have to be actively recruited and personnel changes make it harder for participants to retain group focus. Workers are often members of multiple groups. Though prior work has identified the prevalence of multi-teaming and dynamic teams, it has been unable to explain how workers cope with the challenges the new style of work should cause. This paper systematically characterizes the modern organizational landscape from an individual perspective, by studying how people typically organize work across their multiple collaborative groups. A unique contribution of our work is to examine the interrelationships between the collaborative groups individuals typically participate in. We introduce the notion of a collaboration profile to characterize these interrelations. We expected workers to be overburdened by contributing to multiple teams often with shifting personnel. However, we found that multi-teaming involves productive interrelationships between collaborative groups that ease some of the documented challenges of dynamic teams, such as goal setting, recruiting, and group maintenance. We define a typology that describes the various types of collaborative groups workers participate in, and provide examples of productive interrelations between collaborations. In characterizing interrelations between collaborations, we provide detailed examples of how people exploit resources across their different collaborations to address the problems of working in multiple dynamic teams.

New enterprise tools (wikis, team spaces, social tags) offer potential benefits for enterprise collaboration, providing shared resources to organize work. However, a vast amount of collaboration still takes place by email. But email is problematic for collaboration because information may be distributed across multiple messages in an overloaded inbox. Email also increases workload as each individual has to manage their own versions of collaborative materials. We present a novel system, Topika that integrates email with collaboration tools. It allows users to continue to use email while also enjoying the benefits of these dedicated tools. When a user composes an email Topika analyzes the message and suggests relevant shared spaces (e.g., wiki pages) within the user's collaboration tools. This allows her to post the email to those spaces. An evaluation of Topika's suggestion algorithm shows that it performs well at accurately suggesting shared spaces.