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Untitled Document
William Beachley
Assignment 8
Due: 12/23/04
Questions from your perspective as a role-play participant:
1. What were your impressions of your role-play experience?
I felt that the role playing experience was a useful view of how people
with different backgrounds and interests can come together and collaborate towards
a common solution.
2. Were there any aspects of the role play that made you apprehensive?
Not really. I generally do experience fear and anxiety when I'm "put
on the spot", but I was fairly comfortable with the experience. I tried to
choose a player that fit me so that it would be easier to play the character.
3. Did you feel that the role play contained any elements of what real users from
a real neighborhood working on a real problem might have experienced?
I think it did. Some parts of the role-play became heated and at times
people were putting in information that was dishonest to influence a decision
that would be most beneficial to them. I imagine that this would happen in a real
neighborhood assembly.
4. What do you think might have been lacking from the experience that would have
existed in a real situation rather than a role play?
I think that trying this in a real setting would end in chaos. There
would be more heated debate and collaboration would be impossible with such a
wide array of interests. Also, I imagine there would be a battle of the egos.
The more assertive people would walk all over the less assertive. I saw this to
some extent while watching the role-play.
5. Were there any ways that the technology aided you in reaching a decision? Were
there any ways that it impeded the process?
The technology I feel really only supports four players at a time because
the board gets messy and confusing after a short period of time with a large number
of players. The 2-d board is also limited when trying to look at altitude concerns.
The fact that the pieces have to be shared and overloaded also adds some confusion.
The ability to easily zoom in and zoom out would be extremely useful so that different
perspectives can be seen.
Questions from a
designer's perspective
1. Do you feel that there is any merit to this form of assessment compared to
more traditional isolated task-oriented methods?
Absolutely! I think that anytime people are brought together for a
common goal, the outcome will be more positive than individuals making decisions
in isolation using statistics.
2. What insights might be gleaned from using this technique that other techniques
might miss?
This would make the issue of problem-framing easier to solve. It would
be easier to see the varying interests and concerns that people have and the
impact that decisions have on mitigating or strengthening individual concerns.
It provides a real-time visual look at a problem rather than an arbitrary statistical
view of a problem.
3. What limits do you see to the technique?
The tecnique is limited only by the current technology, but the concept
is solid and would work on a much larger scale. If this could be done in a video
conference environment or even a web environment where people in remote locations
would have access to a view of the board with zoom capabilities, it would be
great.
4. What aspects of the design do you think could be added, removed, or improved
to better support the desired participatory outcomes of the process? These can
be related to the technology, the social setup, the information provided, the
process followed, or other aspects that you think are important.
I think that the functionality of the board is at a max for now, but
usability could be improved. I know that the zoom capability has been implemented,
but it could use some improvement. I think that the current functionality need
to be tweaked for better usability before new functionality is added. I also
feel that different modes or plugins could be implemented so
that the board could be used in a wide variety of collaborative activities other
than bus routing decisions.
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