Title

Author 11 and Author 22

1Institution 1

2Institution 2

Abstract:

Keywords:

1 Introduction

network-based systems offer some functionalities to share these documents within the design team and enhance them with annotations. The positive effect of annotations on knowledge elicitation and team co-ordination have been already reported (Boujut 2003).

Moreover, concurrent engineering principles today requires the co-operative work of an increasing number of stakeholders from different domains of expertise, who have different design practices and different ways to represent their design work. Co-operative design processes requires deliberation and confrontation periods, during which design participants share the current design situation, and discuss collectively the design solutions, to elicit constraints and find alternative solutions to design problems.

The co-operative design work may occur in synchronous situations, for example in design meetings, where participants discuss face-to-face or via videoconferencing tools. There is also an increasing need for asynchronous co-operation today, due to the geographic distribution of the design teams and the need to share and debate design representations earlier in the process (Hisarciklilar and Boujut 2006).

3D product representations are more and more used today during these periods as common ground for participants; in order to reach a mutual understanding of design solutions. However, the number of tools dedicated to support asynchronous design communication in order to support the collective evaluation of design problems is limited.

The aim of this paper is to discuss how annotations should be used in 3D representations to support argumentative design communication. The paper first undertakes a comparative analysis between three technical representations. This analysis shows how mode of representation of design representations has evolved according to the different sharing contexts, and the advantages that their modes offer respectively in their context of use. Then, it analyses a real design case, based on observations in an industrial vehicle company. It concludes with the annotation requirements for effectively supporting the argumentative design discourse.

2 Section title

Documents are graphical or textual representations (a report, a CAD model, etc.), created to accomplish a task in a given context. Although there may be other documents that can be used complementary to the main document, any document can be interpreted independently from other documents.

In contrast, annotations are attached to a document and can be interpreted only in the context of this document. Although they have this contextual relationship with the document, the goal behind their creation may differ from the goal of the entire document. Annotations are not all the time easy to detect especially when the documents are under construction.

The general properties of annotations in mechanical design context can be summarized as follows:

An annotation has a different nature from the document on which it is attached to (for example representing non-geometrical information on a geometrical CAD object),

The target is the object containing information that the annotation refers to. It can either be a document, (textual or graphical), a part of a document (a paragraph, a word or a part of an image), a collection of documents or another annotation. Annotations lifetime is always shorter than the targets lifetime.

The content of an annotation is the information the annotation conveys. This can have various forms (such as textual or graphical) and can be situated in or out of the target document (such as a hyperlink pointing out an external document).

The anchor of an annotation is the point onto the document, where the annotation is attached. Note that the form of the anchor of an annotation can also contain a semantic meaning.

The sphere of influence of an annotation is defined by its personal or public status, i.e. whether the originator and the user of an annotation are different. The form of an annotation is closely related to its sphere, as they often require more effort to its creator to become interpretable to its users.

As we have seen, an annotation is only valid with the document it is attached to. The document constitutes therefore the context that makes it possible to understand the information that it conveyed by the annotation.

2.1 Sub section

From the different design situations that we observed, we concluded that the annotations are essentially used across two phases of the design process: asynchronous phase, where the digital artefact is produced, and synchronous phase, where the artefact is collectively evaluated.

3 Modes of representation: Icons and symbols

The semioticien and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (Peirce 1958) proposes a three-level typology of signs, which characterises the relationship between a sign (or signifier) and an object (signified, which the sign refers to): icons, symbols and indexes. For our purposes here, we will stress on the difference between an icon and a symbol.

For Pierce, an icon is the mode in which the signifier is perceived as resembling or imitating the signified (looking, sounding, feeling, tasting or smelling like it), being similar in possessing some of its qualities. A photograph of an apple, for instance, is an iconic representation, as it refers to it by having the same dimensional proportions, shapes, rendering and colour. Thus, the relationship between these two objects is physical and natural, rather than intellectual and cultural.

On the other hand, a symbol is the mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified; it is, on the contrary, fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional, so that the relationship must be learnt. The language is the most typical example of symbolic representation. The words of a language have most of time any resemblances with the objects that they represent. For example, the word ‘apple’ contains any physical characteristics of the object of apple. And obviously, one should learn the significance of that word in advance in order to recognise this relationship.

Pierce adds that a signifier is never purely symbolic or iconic. It is rather a mixture of these modes with different proportions. For example, even a photograph contains some conventions that are required to be known correctly interpret it. A sign can also be a combination of several signs having different modes. The ‘no smoking’ sign is a typical example of this. The representation is composed from a cigarette drawing (which is rather iconic), encircled by a circle with an oblique bar, which is a conventional way to represent an interdiction (Figure 1).

Insert Figure 1 here

Figure 1: caption

3.1 Sub section

Some typical design artefacts can be compared according to this point of view (Figure 2). For instance, a 3D CAD representation is mainly iconic. Indeed, the tendency in these models is to look like the real mechanical components as much as possible. The level of resemblance of 3D CAD representation increases with technologic advancements, for example through photorealistic rendering techniques. There is still, however, a set of conventions to be learnt in order a 3D CAD model to be interpreted correctly.

References

Baber, C., Cross, J., Yang, F., and Smith, P. (2005). "Supporting Shared Analysis for Mobile Investigators." Proceedings of the International Workshop on Annotation for Collaboration - Methods, Tools and Practices, J.-F. Boujut, ed., Paris, France, 11-20.

Boujut, J.-F. (2003). "User-defined annotations: artefacts for co-ordination and shared understanding in design teams." J. Eng. Design, 14(4), 409-419.

Carlile, P. R. (2002). "A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development." Organization Science, 13(4), 442-455.

Diderot, and d'Alembert. (1772). L'Encyclopédie, Inter-Livres, Paris.

Guibert, S., Darses, F., and Boujut, J.-F. (2005). "Using annotations in engineering design: some results from an experimental study." International Workshop on Annotation for Collaboration, Paris.

Handschuh, S., and Staab, S. (2002). "Authoring and annotation of web pages in CREAM." Proceedings of the 11th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2002), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

Hisarciklilar, O., and Boujut, J.-F. (2006). "Reducing the “Information Gap” Between Synchronous and Asynchronous Co-operative Design Phases." Virtual Concept '06, Cancun, Mexico.

Kahan, J., and Koivunen, M.-R. (2001). "Annotea: an open {RDF} infrastructure for shared Web annotations." Proceedings of the 10th International World Wide Web Conference, Hong Kong, 623-632.

Laureillard, P. (2000). "Conception intégrée dans l'usage: mise en oeuvre d'un dispositif d'intégration produit-process dans une filiaire de conception de pièces forgées," PhD thesis, Grenoble Institute of Technology, Grenoble, France.

Lavoisy, O. (2000). "La Matière et l'Action. Le graphisme technique comme instrument de la coordination industrielle dans le domaine de la mécanique depuis trois siècles," PhD Thesis, Grenoble Institute of Technology, Grenoble, France.