Host institution: University of Milan, Italy;   Lead supervisor: Piero Mussio: mussio AT dico.unimi.it

Description: The research aims at studying and implementing interactive design patterns and tools for enhancing interaction among users, HCI experts and Software Engineering (SE) experts in creative design processes. Communication among stakeholders with different knowledge and skills is a crucial issue, since each stakeholder adopts their own system of signs, notations and languages tailored to their own culture. Communication gaps are today widely recognized as a major source of troubles, which make the design of interactive systems difficult, and as a consequence, can produce systems that do not completely satisfy usability requirements. Communication can be enhanced through the use of Visual Languages tailored to each stakeholder community. The idea is to develop prototypal tools permitting the design of interactive systems through sketching and annotation, and to translate sketches and annotations in a partially formalized language for supporting system implementation.

To achieve this goal, techniques based on HCI design patterns will be adopted in order to analyse and document each step of the design process that must be supported by the prototypal tools. In this scenario, a participatory approach to system design will be adopted and extended to better fit the new requirements emerging in the context of creative design. The application domain is software design and the project involves HCI design-pattern techniques for describing interactive systems and for computer semiotic analysis methodologies.

Outcomes: The project aims at providing a prototype supporting the creative design process together with documents and papers reporting the adopted approach, the implementation details and the results of the usability tests that will be performed on the prototype produced.