Annotating data for supporting collaboration through Design Analytics interfaces

Evaluating design alternatives is a collaborative activity in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry involving the design team members and other non-expert design stakeholders. However, collaborative design tools are usually tailored for the specialized design team members participating in the decision-making process. These tools have limited features for non-design expert users, such as a lack of direct support for sharing feedback or coupling comments with design data, which can hinder collaboration.
In an expert-user study, I investigated how to improve meaningful collaboration through interactive design-data dashboards that can present design alternatives with their form and performance data and enable receiving feedback from the design stakeholders directly on the data visualizations. In the study, I questioned (1) how collaboration between the designers and design stakeholders happens when they consider multiple design alternatives in real-world practices, (2) how coordinated annotation on design data for feedback sharing can encourage collaborative decision-making, and (3) proposal and realization of new system features for annotation-focused and data-informed collaborative evaluation of design alternatives. The results from our study reveal extensive use of multi-target coordinated annotation, methods for embedding annotation in the data visualizations, methods for sorting and organizing annotations, and possible functions for interaction based on the annotations. Based on these results, I propose a set of high-level requirements for coordinated annotation for collaborative decision-making with a high-fidelity annotation feature on a prototype interface built on an existing Design Analytics tool called D-ART.