A Study of the Information Handling . . .

Experiences in the development of a Multiuser Drawing tool " , Proceedings of the third Guel-Figure 6. Level of abstraction of information in each of the informational activity. a major share of the activities are concentrated at labeled and associative level of abstraction. Since the scenario was a conceptual design task it is not surprising that the share of quantitative level is very small. This is because designers seldom got into the details of the design. Except for the quantitative level, the rest of the levels are very well represented in all the three activities. This suggests that any tools which support the informational activities have to be capable of dealing with information at all levels of abstraction. Summary and Future Work This study has focused on using experimentation as a means to better understand the information handling behavior of designers. A framework has been developed for a single designer scenario. Results from the analysis were explained from the nature of the experiment or the current understanding of the design process. A measure for amount of design information in an information fragment and for level of abstraction were introduced. In the future we plan to look at the time dependent behavior of all the parameters and examine second order effects (i.e. looking at change of states and extracting patterns from sequential data) to get deeper insight into the informational behavior. We also need to validate the information measures and level of abstraction categories for different design scenarios and other phases of the design process .