Desperado Overview
Desperado is a computer-based system for indexing design information that is intended to promote effective re-use of design work across projects and groups. As well as promoting re-use of the products of design (e.g., design components), it encourages re-use of ideas, critiques, and other aspects of the decision-making process.The system is based around the notion of an episode. A new episode is marked by the pursuit of a new design question or issue, along with a number of options and criteria that are considered in relation to this question. Episodes occur in many settings, such as during meetings, conversations, mails, and in an individual's or group's ongoing design or development activity. The idea is that the designer uses Desperado along with the devices (e.g., CAD systems, drawing boards, sketchpads) they normally use in their work.
We hope you will use Desperado successfully to encode your ongoing design work. The system is not intended to distract you from you normal design practice, but we hope that it will make it easier for you to organise your ongoing work and to retrieve the work that you have done in the past.
Encoding
There are four main stages to encoding a design episode (the order in which you encode the stages differs slightly depending on whether you are using Desperado I or II). In each stage, the user records a number of episode elements, that is, terms that describe the ongoing design work. The stages and their associated elements are as follows:i. Data - These are elements that describe the question, project, function, people, etc. that the episode concerns. You should supply a short yet meaningful name for each element (note that it is good practice to use element names that might generalise across projects - don't be too component- or project-specific, since the aim is to retrieve across projects and users). The following elements can be encoded:
Question - The focus of the episode.
Client - Whoever you are producing the design for.
Project - The project name.
Type - the nature of the episode (e.g., meeting, user notes, email)
Function - The function to be met by the output of the current design work.
Players - The people involved, or with an interest, in the current design work.
Antecedent - A previous episode for which this episode is a consequent.
ii. Options and criteria - These elements are the options that are generated in pursuit of the question during an episode, along with the criteria that are used to evaluate them. In addition to stating the options and criteria, you are encouraged to undertake an evaluation of them (eliciting a limited form of 'design rationale' - see MacLean et al, 1991). The form that this evaluation takes is different for each version of Desperado.
iii. References - During an episode, you may generate a number of documents, or refer to books, manuals, existing documents etc. You can reference these elements for later retrieval using Desperado.
iv. Hierarchy - While you are pursuing a question in your current episode, it is inevitable that other questions or ideas needing further work will crop up. You can either choose to suspend the current episode, or create a consequent, that is a tag for an episode to be pursued later on. Then, the current episode becomes an antecedent episode for a set of other episodes.
One of the aims of Desperado is to reduce the burden of encoding. It does so by providing a list of terms for each element type that occur in previous episodes stored in the system database. This reduces typing demands and also encourages naming consistency. In Desperado I the names are shown in a Naming Window, while in Desperado II they are shown in point-of-action pop-up menus. In both cases, the order of element names is prioritised such that the system supplies names it judges to be of greatest utility for the current episode.
Retrieval
While encoding a current episode, the database is continually trawled to search for previous episodes that might be of value to ongoing design work. These are sometimes episodes that contain references to similar elements (e.g., functions, options) that are being worked upon, and sometimes to episodes that contain critiques, evaluations and other forms of work that are not directly related but that can inform design thinking. In both systems, a list of previous episodes is provided in a Retrieval Window, in which episodes are shown in prioritised order. The user can then browse any of the episodes shown in this window. In addition, the user can retrieve episodes with standard queries.
Last revision: 16-7-99
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