Design alter egos: constructing and employing fictional characters in collaborative design sessions

Abstract

The paper presents a novel approach to collaborative design of educational software with students, one that asks the participants for the formation and use of fictional characters – design alter egos – as a means towards eliciting requirements and design ideas. In order to evaluate the suggested approach, we conducted 12 collaborative design sessions with the participation of 54 undergraduate university students (aged 19 to 24) for eliciting requirements for the design of an ideal course website. The analysis of the results showed that the design alter egos liberated the majority of the students from the fear of straightforwardly exposing themselves, supported and enhanced their introspection, stimulated their creativity and helped to establish an informal and constructive atmosphere throughout the design sessions. We suggest the use of design alter egos as an engaging and effective supportive technique for co-designing educational software with students.

Contributors

George Triantafyllakos

George Palaigeorgiou

Ioannis A. Tsoukalas

Conference

Publication date: September 2009

Publication date (Print): September 2009

Pages: 20-28

Affiliations

Department of Informatics

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

54124, Thessaloniki, GREECE

Department of Industrial Informatics

T.E.I. Kavalas

65404, Kavala, GREECE

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2009.3

Copyright statement: © George Triantafyllakos et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. People and Computers XXIII Celebrating People and Technology, Churchill College Cambridge, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: People and Computers XXIII Celebrating People and Technology

Conference acronym: HCI

Conference number:

Conference location: Churchill College Cambridge, UK

Conference date: 1 - 5 September 2009

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Computers XXIII Celebrating People and Technology

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2009.3

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing