Collaborative Sense-Making in Design: Involving Stakeholders via Representational Morphing

A central concern in CSCW research is to understand, and represent, the perspectives of the different stakeholders in the design process. This paper suggests collaborative sense-making as a way to view the process toward creating mutually intelligible representations. In order to do this, we describe the types of obstacles that can impede representational literacy across communities of practice coming together in a design effort. We then offer representational morphing as a strategy for addressing these obstacles, and show how it has been implemented in an approach and hypermedia groupware environment named Project Compendium. We conclude by reflecting on the key features of the approach and collaborative tool support which have contributed to this project1s success to date.

* Bell Atlantic Corporation

Network Systems Advanced Technology

400 Westchester Avenue

White Plains, NY 10604

U.S.A.