A Method and a System forSupporting the Process of Chance Discovery

- the process of knowledge creation in terms of Chance Discovery -

Shigeki Amitani

and Koichi Hori

Creativity & Cognition Studios,University of Technology, SydneyPO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia,

shigeki@it.uts.edu.au

,WWW home page:

http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~shigeki/

Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST),University of Tokyo, 153-8904, Japan

Abstract.

In our research, we have developed a method and a systemfor supporting the process of knowledge creation [1]. They have beenapplied to exhibition design processes as an exemplar of the real worlddesign problems. In this paper, we are going to analyze the obtainedprotocol data in exhibition design processes in terms of Chance Discov-ery. The developed method and system successfully worked for designersto

become aware of a chance

and

explain its signiﬁcance

in exhibitiondesign.

1 Introduction

Though some theoretical frameworks have been proposed [2] [3] [4] and theirsigniﬁcances have been recognized, companies face the diﬃculty how to applythe theoretical frameworks to their practices.Some studies have included the practical aspects of knowledge creation. Card[5] has proposed a process of knowledge creation called “knowledge crystalliza-tion” that includes four such stages as (1) acquire information, (2) make senseof it, (3) create something new, and (4) act on it. He developed some systemswith information visualization techniques to support the process of knowledgecreation, however, it has never been mentioned

what types of information should be acquired and how they should be obtained

.Based on the theoretical frameworks such as “design perspective of knowledgemanagement [3]”, we take the position that

knowledge is structured dynamically in accordance with the contexts of human practices, not static entity

[6].We have developed a method “Knowledge Liquidization & Crystallization(KLC)” and a conceptual system “Knowledge Nebula Crystallizer (KNC) [7]”.They have been applied to exhibition design process as an exemplar of the pro-cess of knowledge creation [1]. The system implemented for the exhibition designis named “Knowledge Nebula Crystallizer for Exhibition Design (KNC4ED)”.

In the research, we claimed that

information with its context supports the pro-cess of knowledge creation

because it provides (1) solutions to the groundingproblem [8] [9] and (2) a way to capture situated actions [10].In cooperation with a Japanese advertising company, visitors’ interactionswith exhibition objects and their verbal reports (protocol data) were recordedwith wearable computers [11] [12]. Visitors’ impressions at real exhibition sitesand gaps between designers’ intentions and visitors’ impressions were successfullyarticulated through analyses on the obtained protocol data [1]. In the case of exhibition, we regard the protocol data are grounded information in the realworld. In this paper, we are going to analyze the results of the user studies of the KNC4ED in terms of Chance Discovery for exhibition designers.

2 Knowledge Liquidization & Crystallization (KLC) andKnowledge Nebula Crystallizer (KNC)

Based on the concept mentioned in section 1, the process of knowledge creationis deﬁned as following four phases:

Acquisition

Acquiring grounded information pieces with the contexts of human practices

Analysis

Observing and analyzing the acquired information pieces from variousviewpoints for reﬂective thinking

Restructure

Restructuring the relationships among the obtained information pieces

Production

Producing new information artifacts for explanation on one’s ac-tions and thoughts

Ostwald et al. [7] have suggested a concept of Knowledge Liquidization &Crystallization and a prototype knowledge management system “KnowledgeNebula Crystallizer (KNC)”. However, they mainly dealt with theoretical as-pects. We are going to put them into practice. Knowledge Liquidization & Crys-tallization are deﬁned as follows:

– Knowledge Liquidization

is the process of dissolving knowledge into smallgranularity that have a core grounding in the real world and that preservethe local semantic relationships around the core

– Knowledge Crystallization

is the process of restructuring the relation-ships among the granular units in accordance with a current contextFigure 1 shows how the KNC works. Information within the contexts of human practices is acquired (Fig1 (1)) and dissolved into small elements andstored in the KNC as

source information for knowledge creation

, not as

knowl-edge itself

(2). A user inputs a keyword, then the KNC retrieves the possiblerepresentations of knowledge crystallization suitable for the user’s current con-text with “Dynamic Concept Base (DCB)” as stimuli (3). The DCB deﬁnes thesimilarities among words excerpted from the protocol data.

Fig.1.

The Process of Knowledge Creation and the KNC

2.1 Knowledge Nebula Crystallizer for Exhibition Design(KNC4ED)Overview of the Developed System

As shown above, KNC4ED providesa way to move between overview and detail, and between conceptual and realworlds. Figure 2 shows the snapshot of KNC4ED. The system is mainly com-posed of (1) background processors:

Preprocessor

and

Dynamic Concept Base(DCB)

and (2) user interfaces:

ChronoSpace, ContextMap, ViewpointMap

, and

ControlPanel

. The spatial representation has been adopted in our implemen-tation [13] [3]. The Multi Dimensional Scaling (MDS) method [14] has beenadopted for arranging words in the space in order for the user to analyze howthe indicated words are related to each other.

Preprocessor

The obtained protocol data are manually transcribed into theformat shown in Figure 3. The names of the perceived objects are the cores forKnowledge Liquidization. The protocol data is chunked into units preservingtheir local semantic relationships around the cores. The procedure to deﬁne thesimilarities among the protocol data units is composed of (1) morphologicalanalysis with ChaSen [15] and generate index-word vector of each protocol unit,(2) calculate inner-product of each pair of index-word vectors. (3) generate anindex-index matrix which has similarities between two words as elements (=DCB) [16].