Sunday 3rd July, 9:00 am to 12:30 am
John Gero (UNC Charlotte) | jgero1@uncc.edu
Julie Milovanovic (UNC Charlotte) | jmilovan@uncc.edu
Jianxi Luo (Singapore University of Technology and Design)
Peter Lloyd (TU Delft)
Amaresh Chakrabarti (Indian Institute of Science)
Studying design protocols is a common approach to analyze design thinking processes. Design conversations are key in collaborative design as design concepts are carried through verbalizations. The design community has put effort into qualifying, characterizing and quantifying design thinking processes from design conversations. Methods of linguistic data analysis provide an interesting perspective to analyze design protocol and can inform on the natural structure of design conversation, designers’ sentiment, divergence and convergence flows of ideas and can also offer a potential to help human-computer/AI conversations in the design process.
Natural Language Processing provides an automatic approach to extracting features on the structure and content of design conversation. Using semantic analysis, one can decipher how design knowledge is constructed, how the design space evolves as new concepts are introduced, the social dynamic in design teams or analyze semantic distance in concepts that inform on the convergent and divergent flow of ideas.
The goals of the proposed workshop are to: (1) explore what NLP can bring to studying design thinking, (2) develop a shared framework to implement NLP methods in design thinking studies; and (3) reflect on the application of NLP techniques to provide feedback to design teams through the development of tools.
Workshop participants will gain an understanding of the state of the art in using NLP to study design thinking. They will contribute to defining and refining a common framework for NLP application in design science. The workshop will help strengthen the connection between researchers exploring this topic.
The workshop will start with short presentations from community members currently working on using NLP to analyze design thinking. The presentations will provide an overview of the state of the research on this topic. The presentations will be followed by a demonstration of tools developed my community members, scrips and tool box used to conduct analyses on verbal design protocol with NLP. If you wish to make a presentation please contact Julie Milovanovic jmilovan@uncc.edu
After a break, participants will be split into groups to discuss key ideas to set a framework to implement NLP methods in design thinking studies and application of NLP techniques for design practice. The outcome of the discussion will be synthesized in a shared board (e.g., Miro board or Mural) to be disseminated to the research community.
Proposed outline for the workshop:
1. Introduction – 15 minutes
2. Presentations – 45 minutes
3. Demonstration – 45 minutes
4. Break – 15 minutes
5. Group discussion on 1) key ideas to set a framework to implement NLP methods in design thinking studies and 2) application of NLP techniques – 1 hour
6. Feedback from group discussion – 1 hour
7. Close – 5 minutes