Building community using the Design Principles Database

In this study, we describe a mechanism to support designers in sharing and building design knowledge. The Design Principles Database was developed as an infrastructure for designers to publish, connect, discuss and review design ideas. The database is intended to be built by and serve the community of educational software designers. In this study we examine how the activities of a two-week workshop with educational software designers helped participants synthesize their knowledge. Our outcomes are based on qualitative analysis of online asynchronous discussions, teleconference transcriptions, participants’ artifacts and interviews. The findings are grouped in three areas: a) the ways participants communicated their features, b) the ways participants synthesized design knowledge, and c) strategies for leveraging contributions to the database. The findings indicate that using appropriate activities, the database has the potential to serve crucial functions in enabling the field to synthesize the creative contributions of its members