Exploring representation: a semiotic approach to understanding the image as a carrier of design meaning in a collective design context

Collective design has been investigated increasingly in the design research community in recent years. Researchers so far have provided conceptual models for design environments and looked to crowdsourcing for insights into motivation, communication and representation. However, with motivation and communication well explored, there is a lack of empirical evidence to support the understanding of how representations might be used in a collective context to convey meaningful design-related content. This research aims to explore representational use under collective conditions. To achieve this, a study was conducted to compare an expert group of designers in an online design environment (ODE) with a small crowd consisting of 18 participants. Both groups were required to engage with the same design task over a two week open design session in each environment. The ODE was used to collect data during the experiment. By employing a semiotic coding scheme, specifically developed for this study, the collected data was coded and analysed using comparative, and cumulative comparative, analysis methods. The differences were identified through the comparison of experts' and crowd's behaviour in the ODE. From these results, it can be suggested that representation plays an important role in catalysing and supporting design activity in each group, both with unique characteristics within the ODE. This study reveals that when presented with a 'design problem', and within the collective conditions established for this study, it was observed that human reasoning processes can actively participate as the creative agent in a collective system. In the openly shared collective context of this study the representation was found to be an integral component in the crowd's shared design reasoning processes. These processes consisted of expressed intuition, trains of thought, inquiries, questions and arguments. As such, this study might aid the development of collective mechanisms to support and capture these reasoning processes. Therefore, the outcome of this study may prove beneficial not only for design educators and design researchers but also for World Wide Web (WWW) and software developers.