Keiichi Sato Professor, Design Knowledge and Interactive Systems Research Institute of Design Illinois Institute of Technology: Design Information Framework

Accommodating and bridging many different viewpoints is key to the success of human-centered interactive systems development. Particularly, interactive systems development requires input from many people with different roles, goals and viewpoints, from design to engineering to business, as well as from different types of users. As social, cultural and emotional factors become more important in interactive systems development, multi-disciplinary information management becomes critical for consistently achieving high-quality user experience. We have developed the Design Information Framework (DIF) as a conceptual platform for bridging different views and activities, and for sharing knowledge resources throughout the project. DIF sets an evolving ontology for the domain of concern through project phases and across viewpoints of different stakeholders. Using DIF as a base representation system, mutually communicable and complementary methods and tools can be developed to support activities in interactive systems development such as user and context studies, prototyping, systems modeling, scenario generation, evaluation, and remote collaboration.

The presentation will: 1) introduce the theoretical foundation of DIF concepts, 2) introduce the implementation of the DIF-based Knowledge Management System (DIF-KMS), and 3) show application examples. The first example is the Modular Script Scenario constructed over the DIF-KMS to handle a wide range of data types in a sharable and robust format. Its structured and modularized description format allows rigor, flexibility and scalability for data manipulation. The second example demonstrates DIF-KMS as a flexible and scalable research platform that provides modeling and data management capabilities for our research on Context-Sensitive Design.

Välkomna!
John Waterworth