Recombinant design : leveraging process capture for collective creativity

Design is omnipresent and fundamental to the modern world, yet so little of the rich semantic information of the design evolution is preserved. If we are to gain the greatest knowledge and utility from a creative work, we must understand and preserve the process by which it was designed. To pursue this understanding, I have designed and implemented two electronic media-based process capture frameworks that automatically capture and share process as well as provide process reviewing tools. The first system, Chronicler, is a universal capture framework which captures fine-grained process information at an action resolution, demonstrated through the example of a painting program. The second system, Artwork Genealogy, a component of the OPENSTUDIO project, uses versions embedded with process metadata to document the evolution of artwork in an open collaborative community. This web-based system was launched to users in February 2006 and continues to collect art processes from an active and growing community. Through simple, friendly user interfaces, these two systems encourage designers to donate to a repository of shared, searchable design information from which design rationale, the explanations for design decisions, can be inferred.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Ding, Annie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John Maeda.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36393

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/36393