Etude experimentale de la production collective d'idees en utilisant des technologies de collaboration synchrone a distance

This research presents an exploratory experimental study on the collective production of ideas by design team-members by means of remote synchronous collaborative workspaces. We are interested in strategies for the collective production of ideas and in the dynamics of team-work in order to understand whether the collaboration tools that we are using, answer the demands of the design tasks and whether they fulfil the needs and expectations of the design team-members. Our results will serve as a guide to the betterment, if necessary, of the collaboration-tools used, or will help us choose and combine other collaborative work tools.Our conclusions bear on the individual production of ideas, the group interactions, the dynamics of collaborative work, and the outcomes of teamwork. Our results demonstrate that the teams under investigation prefer using videoconference compared to other means of communication, as verbal communication is deemed essential for collaboration. Moreover, team-members are seeking certain efficiency in their communications: videoconference is used more extensively than chatting and freehand writing on interactive digital fields or even by data exchange through keystrokes. In the ideation stage, the work-team will share, integrate, and select individually generated ideas, either in a verbal, written or graphical fashion. The group is using the brainstorming strategy during the generation of ideas and share their ideas in one or all of the following ways: verbally, written or with the use of graphics and sketches. The way of expressing these ideas depends on the goals needed to be accomplished.The presentation of the problem under consideration by the applicant and the evaluation of the proposed solutions by the work-group, usually takes the form of a verbal presentation, where only one of the participants takes the floor. On the other hand, in meetings where ideas were being generated in a collaborative manner, the exchanges amongst the team-members were numerous. During such meetings, the strategy used by the team is that of brainstorming, while the participants explain and present their ideas as they go along.The strategy of brainstorming is commonly used in groups. The way of expressing their ideas heavily depends on the kind of the tasks assigned to the group as well as on the preferences of its members.The data collection was done during the Blond (2009) study which we closely followed, but had different goals from our own investigation. We closely observed the meetings of six different groups, comprising of three or four design team-members, situated in several locations. These meetings were carried out within a synchronous digital collaborative workspace using the free software Vyew and Skype.The simultaneous verbal expressions of the needs of the applicant of the service are strongly called for. The members of the design team need to understand well the requirements and demands for this reason they need to be able to pose questions to the applicant of service in order to receive appropriate feedback before properly planning out their work on the idea production level.No matter what the means of demonstration are, either verbal, written on with graphics, the team-members can work simultaneously and in parallel, but during the presentation or the evaluation and selection of the ideas they have to communicate verbally in turns. The use of sketches without any verbal explanations would be inadequate for their creation or their selection by the group.In future studies, we would like to investigate the personalisation of synchronous design workspaces according to the demands of the tasks at hand, the dynamic of collaborative sketch drafting and the visual expression of ideas. Finally, this study has opened up the way towards a more thorough investigation of the evaluation of the generation of ideas in other work domains, collaborative activities and workspaces. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...