Chair of Internet Technologies and Systems

Proposal for the design thinking research program e.valuate Evaluation of supportive instrument usage for interdisciplinary team processes

Research Investigator

Prof. Dr. Hasso-Plattner-Institute for IT Systems Engineering [email protected].de

Project Team

Bert Baumann, [email protected] Oliver Böckmann, [email protected] Andreas Groß, [email protected] Christian Willems, [email protected] Hasso-Plattner-Institute for IT Systems Engineering

Johannes Erdmann, [email protected] , faculty of humanities

Christine Noweski, [email protected] University of Potsdam, faculty of business- and social sciences

Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel Chair of Internet Technologies and Systems Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Softwaresystemtechnik Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3, Potsdam, 14482, Abstract

Design thinking as innovative process makes use of a broad variety of instruments. Next to the predominant use of whiteboards, post-its and simple pens, also digital document- or communication- applications are employed.

The degrees of efficiency of instruments used in the process so far, differs not only by the characteristics of the instruments themselves. In interdisciplinary team environments – which are essential to the design thinking approach – the way and efficiency of tool usage depends on the personal and professional background of the team members. Furthermore instruments suit specific process phases with varying success. Most of the time, a combination of instruments will be reality. Next to a profound research in this field, we plan to look at individual and unintended tool usages, which could serve as best practices for entire teams.

First Hypothesis: Process support of existing instruments can be optimized through orchestration according to teams and projects. Additionally, it is intended to investigate the potential of the different instruments on supporting extensive and substantial documentation. This is requested from individuals, teams, project partners, other stakeholders and succeeding project teams. Nonetheless it is inadequately implemented. The goal is to understand why and how a suitable instrument setting can support better results.

Second Hypothesis: Documentation needs of all stakeholders can be satisfied without additional time-effort by optimizing documentation instruments. Based on the results of the initial research and observations, the project will undertake an analysis of instrument-usage efficiency. Therefore a measurement framework is proposed.

The research shall result in a deep understanding of needs and practices of supportive instrument usage for interdisciplinary team processes. Our aim is to give recommendations regarding future instrument-usage settings and development for design thinking projects and for preliminary skill acquisitions.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel Chair of Internet Technologies and Systems HPI, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3, Potsdam, 14482, Germany Introduction Most of the people that ever have experienced the Design Thinking process within a project team have most probably noticed problems resulting from poor documentation of insights and results. Results from earlier project phases are difficult to remember in broad context and arduous to store permanently. Communicating those results and insights to others (i.e. external partners) can be even more challenging. Better documentation should help creative teams to avoid these problems. Besides this it could also make Design Thinking more sustainable. A central criteria for a convenient setting of documentation tools will be the „extra time effort“ for the team. All time, spend on this part has to be understood as deducted from another creative process part.

To allow the teams to work hurdle-free, and this way save time, an elaborated setting of supportive instruments, which needs to be adopted to the personal and professional background of the team member, as well as to specific project phases needs to be compiled. Needs Adressed Main subject of the evaluation efforts put forward in this proposal will be documentation instruments and -results for individuals, teams, project partners, other stakeholders and succeeding project teams. Students within a design project want documentation to happen instantly with no extra work. Students saving time on documentation can dedicate themselves much more to the essential processes of innovation.

External project partners or institutions have high interest in complete and substantial project, process and decision documentation. Every project participant needs easy and intuitive access to the respective relevant information.

Especially researchers can profit from the possibilities for convenient retrieval of “stored expertise”. A profound documentation can provide valuable data for further analysis within the meta-level context of Design Thinking. Additionally, the information can support and speed up coaching and learning – new students can in fact build on the research and ideas of others.

Gaining real access to the insights and results of other projects requires comprehension of the Design Thinking process inside the specific project group. Based on the assumption that humans tend to remember facts within the context of the learning situation, it would be desirable to also depict that context in the documentation. This information can support people to retrace their own decision- making process at any later time. It has to be shown that this is also valid for the understanding of the Design Thinking process of others and that it can support individual and collective learning.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel Chair of Internet Technologies and Systems HPI, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3, Potsdam, 14482, Germany Experiment Design The experiment consists of the following parts: initial research, observation, creating a measurement framework, controlled experiment and synthesis.

Initial Research The goal of this first step is an extensive familiarization on supportive instruments and applications regarding creative team processes.

Therefore, a profound research on existing project documentation, analogue and digital tool usage, practices as well as experiences will be carried out. This research phase will be finalized with a profound description of the designated observation context.

Observation The objective of this second step is to observe the points of interest in reality and to achieve a deeper understanding of dependencies. Which factors do have a direct influence on the mode of tool usage? An especially interesting aspect might be the focus on unintended tool usage by individuals as a best practice example for others or to reason recommendation for further tool development.

Observation includes interviews with team members, teachers and other stakeholders of current and prior Design Thinking projects.

Creating a measurement framework At this point the observation results will be analyzed to gain profound comprehension of influential attributes and specific user needs. A measurement framework that enables initial evaluation of the current instrument usage will be defined. A meaningful, absolute measure will be derived, providing a basis for comparison of suggested improvements.

Controlled Experiment Monitored teams shall be split up into teams with free choice of instruments and those with predefined instrument settings, all having the same design challenge. The measuring devices will be calibrated beforehand.

The intention is to monitor several constellations of analogue and digital instrument settings to compare their usage efficiency, the quantity and quality of documentation, as well as the usability, the acceptance and impact on satisfying user needs of the teams. It is furthermore intended to compare the influence the instruments have on each other. More variables shall be defined after the initial research phase.

The variables that will be controlled during the experiment (design variables), such as process phase, team composition, tool combination, individual and team usage, project challenge, and project duration will be taken into account. A significant number of projects will be prosecuted across academic and business settings. Current business partners comprise SAP Design Services Team, IDEO and academic partners are Institute of Design at Stanford, HPI School of Design

Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel Chair of Internet Technologies and Systems HPI, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3, Potsdam, 14482, Germany Thinking in Potsdam and University of Maribor, Slovenia. An increasing number of cooperating partners is aspired.

Synthesis Measurement results shall be analyzed to obtain extensive knowledge about the best combination of tools for specific project phases, team constellations and individual skills. Besides this, the quantitative and qualitative outcomes will be visualized.

A framework on tool usage and best practices in creative processes will be realized. This framework will uncover the constraints that remained unsolved and which individual and team needs were insufficiently satisfied. Outlook Workshop on tool usage improvements The accomplishment of a workshop with participants from multiple disciplines including design thinking experts, tool specialists and average users, will be the development of solutions to overcome existing tool usage gaps and constraints exposed by our findings. The goal is to find new possibilities to orchestrate tools into creative processes within different domains.

Proof of concept Measuring performance and qualitative impact of recommendations can be done by testing the improved methods and instruments in practice. Testing cannot be a part of the proposal at hand, but should unquestionably be included in the first phases of follow-up projects.

The characteristic numbers that can be derived from this proposal’s results can only be quantitative, such as the number of specific problem situations that can be discovered or the amount of recommendations that can be given. Qualitative analysis of the final recommendations could be conducted in form of an expert evaluation by professional creative workers or scientist from appropriate research domains. Expected Impact The maximum accomplishment would be the total satisfaction of users‘ needs, as addressed before, by composing and integrating existing instruments into the design thinking process. Recommendations will be made on:

• the choice of tools and best usage practices according to project goal, team constellation and other relevant factors

• further tool development and

• preliminary skill-acquisition for teams.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel Chair of Internet Technologies and Systems HPI, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3, Potsdam, 14482, Germany Research investigator – Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel

Biographical Notes Dr. sc. nat. Christoph Meinel (1954) is the CEO and President of the Hasso Plattner Institute for IT- Systems Engineering (HPI) and full professor (C4) for Internet- and WWW-Technologies. Beside his professorship in Potsdam he is a professor both at the School of Computer Science of the Technical University of Beijing (China) and at the Luxembourg Institute of Advanced Studies in Information Technology at the University of Luxembourg.

Christoph Meinel is author or co-author of 7 text books and monographs and of various conference proceedings. He has published more than 300 scientific papers in highly recognized international scientific journals and conferences. His high-security solution Lock-Keeper is international patented and licensed by Siemens AG. Most of his publications and recordings of his lectures can be freely accessed on the Internet (www.tele-task.de). His main research interests and activities focus on applied research and engineering in Internet Technology and Systems, particularly in the fields Trust and Security Engineering, Web University and Secure Telemedicine as well as in Computational Complexity and in formal (BDD-based) methods for IT-system design and verification

Beside his work as a university professor, from 1998 to 2002 Christoph Meinel was CEO and director of the Research Lab “Institute for Telematics” in Trier where most of the budget came from applied research projects with industrial partners. The expertise of the institute laid mainly in the fields: Internet Security, Electronic Publishing / E-Learning and Telemedicine. In between 1996-2007 Christoph Meinel also was member of the scientific board of the IBFI Schloss Dagstuhl and speaker of the special interest group on complexity of the German society “Gesellschaft für Informatik” (GI). Since 2007 he is chairman of the German IPv6 Council.

Christoph Meinel is chief editor of the scientific electronic journal “ECCC – Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity” and of the “IT-Gipfelblog”. As a member of various international scientific boards and program committees he has organized many international symposia and conferences. In 2006, as the president of HPI he hosted the first German “National IT-Summit” of the German Federal Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel Chair of Internet Technologies and Systems HPI, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3, Potsdam, 14482, Germany References There are two web-based e-learning programs at the Hasso Plattner Institute for IT System Engineering, which are established since a couple of years. One project is called Tele-Lab IT-Security, an individual training system for security lessons in a virtualized laboratory environment.

The other one is tele-TASK (Tele-Teaching Anywhere Solution Kit). This E-Learning solution is an innovative technology for the production and transmission of presentations via the internet (i.e. for instant tele-lecturing). Ongoing research on this project includes (semi-)automatic multimedia annotation and intelligent tutoring.

The list below comprises relevant publication on e-learning, metadata annotating and web technologies.

• Stephan Repp, Andreas Groß, Christoph Meinel: „Dynamic Browsing of Audiovisual Lecture Recordings Based on Automated Speech Recognition“, in: „Intelligent Tutoring Systems“, 2008, pp. 662-664

• Katrin Wolf, Serge Linckels, Christoph Meinel: „Teleteaching Anywhere Solution Kit (tele-TASK) Goes Mobile“, ACM SIGUCCS Fall Conference 2007, Orlando (USA)

• Katrin Wolf, Christoph Meinel: „Tele-TASK - Methoden des Teleteachings“, in: Hans-Joachim Laabs (Ed.): „Multime Dies 2007. Wir gehen multimedial. Kommt Ihr mit?“, pp. 50-55, 2007, Potsdam

• Long Wang, Christoph Meinel: „Mining the Students' Learning Interest in Browsing Web- Streaming Lectures“, in: „Proc. of IEEE CIDM' 07“, (to appear), Honolulu (Hawaii)

• Serge Linckels, Christoph Meinel: „Resolving Ambiguities in the Semantic Interpretation of Natural Language Questions. Intelligent Data Engineering Automated Learning“, 2007, Burgos (Spain)

• Christian Willems, Christoph Meinel: „Tele-Lab IT-Security: an Architecture for an online virtual IT Security Lab, International Journal of Online Engineering (iJOE), Vol 4, No 2“, 2008

• Dirk Cordel, Christoph Meinel, Stephan Repp, and Christian Willems: „Explorative Learning of Wireless Network Security with Tele-Lab IT-Security“, in: „Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Hybrid Learning“, pp. 213-224, 2008,

Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel Chair of Internet Technologies and Systems HPI, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3, Potsdam, 14482, Germany Timeline and Milestones The accomplishment intend the separation of several project stages.

2008 2009

Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep

Initial Research

Observation Point of View

Measurement Experiment Plan Framework

Controlled Experiment

Synthesis Framework

Documentation

Follow Up and Workshop

Year-end Deliverable

Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel Chair of Internet Technologies and Systems HPI, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3, Potsdam, 14482, Germany Budget

Salaries Intended is an interdisciplinary research team with experience in Design Thinking and its instruments. During the term of the project, the two main researchers should be supported by two student workers for data collection, implementing- and installation issues and general support.

2 x full-time PhD scholarship, 25.000 € per year

2 x student workers, each 10.000 € per year

Travel Expenses In the observation phase of the research project, distributed Design Thinking teams in Maribor (Slovenia), Potsdam and Palo Alto / Stanford will be visited. Participation at international conferences is mandatory to get intensive contact to the design thinking community for learning and sharing insights.

3 researchers traveling to Palo Alto, USA for 2 weeks (observation stage): each 3.000 €

3 researchers traveling to Maribor, Slovenia for 1 week (observation stage): each 1.000 €

2 researchers traveling to AIGA, xcv and DUX: each 5.000 €

Required Infrastructure Researcher require additional equipment.

Hardware + Software (laptops, mapping tools, office, etc.): 5.000 €

Multimedia Equipment (camera, microphones, etc): 2.500 €

Supplies and minor equipment (paper, batteries, storage devices, etc.): 500 €

Overall required budget: 100.000 €

Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel Chair of Internet Technologies and Systems HPI, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3, Potsdam, 14482, Germany