Supporting multidisciplinary collaboration: requirements from novel HCI education

ABSTRACT

Many collaborative design tools may suffer from being too generic to address the specific complexities inherent in multidisciplinary collaboration. We provide accounts of several multidisciplinary HCI courses at our institution, elaborating on the challenges student teams face when integrating design practice from a wide variety of disciplines. Of particular interest are the distinct approaches that these multidisciplinary teams adopt that differ from more common forms of collaborative design. We suggest reasons for the poor rate of adoption of existing collaborative support tools and outline specific suggestions for directions in both ethnographic studies of multidisciplinary collaboration and collaborative systems design.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Prototyping; Theory and methods

  J. Computer Applications
  J.5 ARTS AND HUMANITIES
      Subjects: Fine arts

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Theory

Keywords:
design education, design tools, low fidelity prototyping, multidisciplinary collaboration, social bookmarking