Editor’s Note: Advent of the Web as a low cost publishing medium has had a negative impact on educational television. There are many disciplines where distance learning and collaborative activities are best accomplished by television. MIT and its international associates provide us with some of their current experienced with teleconferences for interaction to factor into our plans for distance learning.

Connecting Distant Communities
through Video Communication Technologies
in Design Studio Workshops

Federico Casalegno and Larry Sass

Abstract

This paper focuses on the description of how to use videoconferencing to connect physically distributed communities involved in distant design workshop.

We discuss connected communities using remote collaboration communication technologies and report the results of ethnographic observations carried out during two  collaborative distant design workshops held at the MIT -Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Fabricating Ceramics Class, Fall 2002: Generative and Parametric Tools for Design and Fabrication, Spring 2003. During these workshops, MIT students cooperated with other students (IST, Portugal) or with a private company (Fosters & Partners, London) in order to better achieve their design projects.

The goal of this paper is to discuss the use of videoconferencing tools in learning environments in order to improve collaboration among distant communities.
 

Keywords: Connected communities, video-conferencing, remote collaboration, distant communication dynamics, learning environments, interactive digital media.

Distant design workshop description

Classes

We observed two different collaborative design workshops.

[A] The workshop on Fabricating Ceramics focused on the designing process using parametric modeling and prototyping software with ceramics. The workshop was a research seminar using existing prototyping tools in new ways in order to fabricate curved surfaces of varying shape and scale with ceramic materials. The workshop’s objective was to work out a designing process, in this case with bricks or blocks, that was similar to Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings using custom made tiles, using computation as the designing generator and prototyping as our beginning and final output. The workshop had also intense online design collaboration with The Department of Engineering at The Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Portugal. Students there mainly focused on designing, while students at MIT focused on materials and fabrication.

During the semester, the classes were divided into groups and formed mixed American-Portuguese teams. To improve the collaboration between students and between universities, the teams were composed by MIT students working with IST students. During the semester they had regular on-line collaboration sessions. Remote collaborative sessions were based either upon team-to-team collaboration or upon class-to-class collaboration, which included the entire learning community. In the team-to-team collaboration, the students were working on their own projects, communicating with their remote partners in order to achieve and improve their design project. During the class-to-class on-line collaboration students presented their works; professors could monitor the status of the design projects and give advice and critics about the following steps. Twenty students took part in the workshop: 12 from MIT and 8 from IST. If we consider the entire learning community, including faculty, teaching assistants and administrators, we have more then 40 people involved.

[B] The Generative and Parametric Tools for Design and Fabrication was a collaborative workshop with Foster and Partners (London) that explored a computationally-based, explorative approach to design. Parametric and generative design tools were combined with digital fabrication and rapid-prototyping techniques, in a cyclical process, to generate and evaluate alternative, innovative design solutions to a design problem. The design problem focused on light. 10 MIT students were involved in the workshop, and considering the entire learning community 20 people were involved in this design workshop.

In both workshops, the learning community used a complex collaborative environment, using different interactive media to collaborate and achieve their design project.

Remote collaborative learning environment communication technologies

The goal of the workshop was to use communication technologies to create a continuous space to connect remote communities for a better learning and design experience. One of the innovative aspects of these workshops is the use of different technologies, the way that the learning community collaborated in exchanging knowledge and documents, jointly working on projects and the team-to-team interaction. Here below is a description of the different media we use to connect distant communities.

StudioMIT

StudioMIT (http://studio.mit.edu) is an on-line educational environment that complements the physical studio environment; it is a Web-based platform that supports the community of students, staff, and faculty. During the semester, the learning community used Studio MIT to share files, upload and download documents, create mailing lists, interact in discussion forums, communicate and exchange project related information.

Video and Audio Conferencing

NetMeeting's audio and video conferencing features allow you to communicate with anyone on the Internet (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/NetMeeting/Features/default.ASP). This allows both parties to see and talk to each other; in the case of this collaboration, it allowed the class to present their projects, collaborate and gain valuable and immediate feedback and comments. Features in NetMeeting also include a whiteboard for simultaneously sharing documents, program sharing, and chat and file transfer.

iCom

This is an MIT-Media Lab project; it connects distant sites. Its normal mode is background, providing continuous ambient awareness between all stations, but at any time it can be transformed into a foreground mode for ad-hoc Tele-meetings or casual interaction, without the need of dialing telephone numbers or waiting for connections to be established (http://www.medialabeurope.org/hc/projects/icom/). We also used PictureTel, establishing a high quality of video conferencing.

Email and Instant messaging.

With Instant Messaging people are able to communicate via instant messages, to chat individually or in a group and send/receive pictures. The students also used email to communicate and participate in the class mailing lists or forum discussions.

Research and evaluation methodology

The research methodology we used is based on 3 complementary steps and it is part is of a wider research project on the use of digital media in education (creativity & learning with digital media: (http://www.media.mit.edu/federico~/creativity).

[1] Experts

The first step of the methodology consists of interviewing education and interactive digital media experts. These interviews drive us to investigate the relationship between interactive media and learning, especially focusing on the pedagogical issues emerging with the implementation of new collaborative learning environments and with the use of computational tools for education. This stage provides essentially a generic theoretical framework.

[2] Ethnographic observation

The second step consists of carrying out ethnographic observation during the workshops, observing students and on-going pedagogical activities. Throughout the class and the on­line and face-to-face collaboration, I took notes and annotate all kinds of information gathered by observing the learning community work in progress. On the other side, I had access to all the students’ work through the Studio MIT on-line collaborative platform, or accessing the mailing list where the learning community discussed not only about the logistics of the class but also about the social dynamics and the collective works that the class was doing.

[3] One-to-one interviews

The last step consisted in doing one-to-one interviews with all the students involved in the class, using a qualitative research methodology. These interviews took place in a face-to-face situation (Boston, Lisbon and London) and I followed the same interview grid with all the students. The interviews’ content has been divided into categories, classified and analysed. I interviewed the entire learning community members at the MIT in Boston, at the IST in Lisbon and at Fosters and Partners in London

Design Exchange at a Distance

Design studio

The definition of a design studio dates back as far as 1823 with methods of teaching with a strict focus on classical design. The school was composed by four stages of learning leading to the designation of a diploma of architecture. [1] The makeup of the Ecole has been transferred to the US by William Ware to the halls of MIT in the late 1860s [2]. The typical MIT studio environment for architects is an open space where students design in groups, where students glance over a desk at fellow students work or exchange comments through late night interactions. The open studio environment started (library). In most schools that environment continues as a model of collaborative learning environments. Now, thanks to new communication technologies, we connect distant learning environments, creating learning connected communities that learn, work and interact from distant places. In that context, a major issue within design studios is to form effective learning communities and to use communication technologies that improve their capabilities. Video communication tools help create stronger connected communities and enormously expand their ability to create and work jointly.

Audiovisual technologies for education

Television and audiovisual techniques for educational purposes have been introduced in the mid fifties [3]; since then, the evolution and the variety of these technologies increased enormously and the debate concerning the pedagogical use of audiovisual techniques for better educational results is still very open. Those techniques are important for two main reasons: the first one considers the fact that audiovisual techniques allow knowledge transmission and effective information sharing. From a media theory point of view, J. Mayrowitz [4] showed the importance of the introduction of television in educational settings, and of creating a common cultural background between spread communities. From a psychological point of view, D. Kerkchove [5] pointed out how audiovisual techniques deeply influence our cognitive thinking models. From a communication and design point of view, Steve Wittaker [6] studies the implications of using audiovisual technologies for interpersonal communication. The second main reason is that those techniques efficiently improve the collaboration between distant communities. Audiovisual technologies are crucial in the educational process because they are at the crossroad between the exchange of information among communities and their ability to process, assimilate and transform it into knowledge [7]. Moreover, these technologies have an enormous impact on connecting distant communities. Hereafter we are interested in reporting our experience in using audiovisual technologies to connect communities and to improve distant design.

Using videoconferencing in design projects to connect communities

In distant design projects, videoconferencing technologies were mainly used in four complementary ways in order to: lecture at a distance, discuss ongoing projects, allow team-to-team collaboration and, finally, to provide video-cafes and common meeting places for students. These modalities of using video communication technologies foster the emerging of an active learning connected community.

Lectures at a distance and import critics’ expertise

In this case videoconferencing was mainly used to transmit knowledge thus favoring forms of distant teaching and learning. Distant universities could benefit from remote professors in an effective way. Lessons were given from one university to the other in order to create a common knowledge background and to allow different communities of students to share the same level of knowledge and to have the same intellectual tools to work on their design projects.

Fig. 1: Distant teaching in studio environments

Secondly, critics from remote experts enriched the team’s works. Thanks to audiovisual techniques, students could present their work to critics and benefit from their comments and remarks. Learning from experts at a distance where practitioners teach their specialty in studio, anywhere studio happens, is a very important aspect of the use of audiovisual techniques.

Figs. 2, 3: Students present and discuss with remote experts in London

Project based group discussion

Project teams regularly presented their works to the entire learning community (including professors, students and invited experts), updating all the members on the state of the art of their projects and favoring exchanges and critics between the various communities.

Fig. 4: Cross presentation between MIT and IST.

Team-to-team collaboration.

Each small team used the videoconferencing techniques to cooperate with their distant team, to create, comment and discuss their on going projects in a regular basis.

Fig. 5: Team-to-team collaboration.

Fig. 6: Team-to-team collaboration, students sharing sketches.
 

Video Cafes and common meeting places

It’s very important to have strong ties among community members to improve learning community dynamics. In order to do so, and to develop social capital, mutual trust and to better know each-other, students used videoconferencing systems to chat about non educational issues and mostly focusing to simply getting to know each other, to converse about cultural differences, common hobbies and other topics that improved the community cohesion.

Using videoconferencing in these four different settings allowed us to create a video mediated environment and to provide an efficient technological setting for different modalities of communication. At the same time, this allowed us to foster communication and practice, transforming two separated groups of students into an efficient community of practice. With this methodology, distant communities could interact on aspects related to their design projects and remotely work together in common design projects, but they could also discuss and chat on all kind of topics.

Videoconferencing was the first modality we used and it allowed us to transmit knowledge from the top level of the learning community, from professor to students. It was the most formal modality of interaction, but it was fundamental, from a content point of view, to create a common knowledge background and, from a logistic aspect, to organize the workflow among distant communities.

The second modality was important because it forced each group to systematically produce some sort of sharable artifacts to discuss with the entire learning community.

We designed our learning environments to foster what Seymour Papert [8] defines as constructionism: “[Constructionism] … attaches special importance to the role of constructions in the world as a support for those in the head, thereby becoming less of a purely mentalist doctrine. It also takes the idea of constructing in the head more seriously by recognizing more than one kind of construction (some of them as fare as removed from simple building as cultivating a garden), and by asking questions about the methods and material used” (S. Papert, 1993, p. 143). S. Papert emphasizes the importance of externalised, socially sharable entities, artefacts or objects in the learning process. Learning process is based on the internalisation of the external information and by the externalisation of internal information, in a cyclic perpetual dynamic. This is the way we structured the learning process: students had weekly assignments that they had to work on, print 3D artefacts and construct models that they had to share and comment with the entire learning community. The use of audiovisual techniques is in this case fundamental because it obliges the entire learning communities to work on sharable artefacts that they can talk about during the videoconferences.

The third modality in which we used audiovisual techniques was characterized by a more informal interaction where communication was work related, improving the exchange and the implementation of ideas into design project. As J. S. Brown and P. Duguid point out, “ … the talk and the work, the communication and the practice are inseparable. The talk made the work intelligible, and the work made the talk intelligible. As part of this common work-and-talk, creating, learning, sharing, and using knowledge appear almost indivisible. Conversely, talk without the work, communication without practice is if not unintelligible, at least unusable. Become a member of a community, engage in its practices, and you can acquire and make use of its knowledge and information. Remain an outsider, and these will remain indigestible¹”.

The last modality was very important in order to develop social ties among distant communities. Conversation about non-project related topics reinforced the construction of stronger social ties among distant communities. It is an efficient way for people to share experiences and we observed a direct proportional relationship between the success in designing innovative projects and the amount of non-project related conversations. Moreover, the continuous video linking was a success for the studio interaction during reviews and non-reviews times. Socialization was just as much a part of the learning and collaboration process as design exchange. Students spent many hours on personal exchange before discussing their design projects.

As in a physical design studio situation, people mix socialization times at the cafés and working times at the desk with socialization times at the desk and working times at the cafés, we fostered the same kind of dynamics using multimode kind of interaction also through video connection. The synergic combination and the parallel use of these four videoconferencing modalities provoked a very important result. We provided the students and the entire learning community a multimode communication visual channel for remote interaction: they used it in multiple ways thus creating a real space for connected communities remote collaboration. Thanks to this multimode videoconferencing they filled a place with human interaction creating a living space for learning.

Social Capital, gaze and object oriented talk

Social Capital

Audiovisual tools, and the communication dynamics that derives from the implementation of those tools in the educational environments, allowed distant communities involved in the workshop to build social capital and increase mutual trust: this is an important as well a fundamental condition to perform collaborative distant design projects [9, 10, 11, 12, 13]. First of all, interacting through video transforms a distant individual into a real person. When people see their partners during videoconferencing they become “real” people, as one of the interviewed students pointed out: “The visual more about a social use... I mean we could see them, so they became real people… I think it was most useful if we were showing them some sketches, so they can understand what’s going on…”. Media are useful to provide different type of interaction: some are more suitable for transmitting strategic-oriented information and others are more suitable for favoring socialization processes. And both are necessary. Videoconferencing is a very important tool for socializing: “I think it was really important because I feel it made me connected with people particularly since we spend so much time on a computer for instant messages and email, I get a lot of mail from people I’ve never seen … I felt like when we started meeting with them over NetMeeting, it started to be more personal, so I felt like the visual part was really helpful”.

Secondly, a relevant remark on the social capital building dynamics, not related to video-collaboration, concerns the physical meetings. In fact, one of the most relevant aspects of the social capital community building is that communities, to develop social capital, have to meet physically and independently from their purposes. It is during the co-presence interaction that people build mutual trust and social capital. For our workshop, one of the key issues to foster the building dynamics of the community was the face-to-face interaction among participants. Workshops participants met at least one time during their design projects. This element helped in a very consistent way the construction of social ties among people, transforming a group of spread students into a connected community For example, the travel to London solidified internal relationships among MIT community but also the external relationship with the entire learning community. In this case, the visit was necessary to obtain important strategic information for the design projects but also to playfully socialize. The synergy between these two dimensions created an experiential community and created the connected learning community.

Another very important element to understand the building of social ties among the community is that what created a solid ties among community members' is not the structural elements but, on the contrary, the shared experience. For instance, some of the MIT students were Portuguese native speakers. A first hypothesis we had is that Portuguese MIT speaking students would be more reliable and they would help build community ties with IST students. This did not happen because what students were looking for, and what helped the community construction dynamics, was a mixture of conversation on everyday life and design project, socializing and working. In this sense, American students were playfully discussing with Portuguese students, trying to understand another language and another culture, and vice-versa. This was an element that helped to mix socialization and work, and that constructed an experience-based connected community.

It is because we used so extensively multiple modalities of videoconferencing, in a relatively short period, that two distant communities who didn’t know each other before starting the collaboration started to socialize and increased their social capital Social capital is important to successfully achieve distant design projects between remote communities.

Fig. 7: Students collaborating and jointly working in the same document
 with on-line videoconferencing.

Fig.8: Students commonly working in their design projects and, in the same documents, making fun and adding personal communication.