collaboratorium/collaboratory

Jacob Buur and Susanne Bødker (2000) coined the term “design collaboratorium” as a means of reframing usability work. The design collaboratorium, as they envisioned it, is simultaneously a process and an open physical and organizational place where engineers, designers, and usability professionals meet and work together. They explain their motivation to move away from a “usability lab,” the traditional usability setting, as stemming from their desire to involve usability concerns early in the design process, their regard for actual use rather than what is produceable in a laboratory setting, and their desire to promote collaboration between “a variety of persons, groups, and competencies in the design process” (p. 302). In a later piece (2002), they cited mobile technologies as an additional impetus for this shift. The impact of contexts of use is particularly difficult to assess in the office-like setting of the usability laboratory; wireless technologies enable usability professionals to explore actual use situations when evaluating artifacts.

Burr and Bødker (2000) saw “design collaboratorium” as holding “on to some potentially positive connotations of the term laboratory—those relating to experimentation” and leaving behind the analysis/evaluation bias of usability (p. 297). My own experience, however, suggests that those connotations may or may not be conducive to writing instruction. This name, depending on how it is read, also foregrounds collaboration which is a productive writing practice.

Recognizing the applicability of this name for wireless environments, Purdue University has established the Digital Learning Collaboratory (DLC). Purdue’s Multimedia Instructional Development Center (MIDC) describes this area as a “well-equipped digital media development lab” (Multimedia Instructional Development Center, 2002), underscoring the “lab” in “collaboratory,” but the MIDC also makes note of the collaboration rooms affiliated with this setting. Like Burr and Bødker’s design collaboratorium, Purdue’s DLC is a fluid place that is reconfigurable and moveable in that wireless laptops are available for checkout by students and staff.

Read a few conclusions.