The COnCEPT project aimed to create a collaborative and creative design platform. This interdisciplinary and multi-institutional project provided the initial context of my PhD topic and research around collaborative and creative design practices. My doctoral research explored how design teams use artefacts and other documentation to progress work and exchange knowledge. As a result, I produced several digital tools for supporting collaborative decision-making among multidisciplinary design teams.

Project summary

The scope of the COnCEPT project is the implementation of a semantically driven collaboration framework to be integrated into future synchronous/asynchronous collaborative design environments, dedicated to assist professional industrial designers when distributed during the early stages of the design process and in collaboration/communication with their clients. A number of research and technological challenges will be addressed, including the semantic integration of collaborative tools and data, effective methods for communication and interaction among distributed teams, group awareness and the use of metaphors for conceptual design; which have unique considerations and applications during early-stage product design.

Funded by: European Union’s FP7 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 610725

Read more at: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/610725

Key project outputs

Re-thinking Traceability: A Prototype to Record and Revisit the Evolution of Design Artefacts (2018) Gutierrez Lopez, M., Rovelo Ruiz, G., Haesen, M., Luyten, K., Coninx, K. ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work GROUP 18, Sanibel US.

Capturing Design Decision Rationale with Decision Cards (2017) Gutierrez Lopez, M., Rovelo Ruiz, G., Haesen, M., Luyten, K., Coninx, K. 16th IFIP TC.13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT 2017, Mumbai, India. [Reviewer’s Choice Award]

Untangling Design Meetings: Artefacts as Input and Output of Design Activities (2017) Gutierrez Lopez, M., Luyten, K., Vanacken, D., Coninx, K. 35th annual conference of the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics ECCE 2017, Umeå, Sweden.

Helaba: A System to Highlight Design Rationale in Collaborative Design Processes (2015) Gutierrez Lopez, M., Haesen, M., Luyten, K., Coninx, K. 12th International Conference on Cooperative Design, Visualisation and Engineering CDVE 2015, Mallorca, Spain.

Study and Analysis of Collaborative Design Practices (2015) Gutierrez Lopez, M., Haesen, M., Luyten, K., Coninx, K. 4th Participatory Innovation Conference 2015 PIN-C 2015, The Hague, Netherlands.