Representations in interactive software development

The motivation for the workshop arose from research being conducted under an EPSRC funded project, "Representations for supporting communication between users and designers" at QMW, University of London. The background to this research is the assumption that good communication underpins collaborative design. Since neither users nor designers have unlimited time to devote to collaborative design, effective representations of, for example, users' work or design solutions, are necessary. The aim of the project is to investigate different forms of representation for communication between users and designers with the goal of improving the efficiency and quality of interactive work systems. The workshop was organised by the authors in order to investigate how existing research might contribute to research on this project, and also to enable discussion of research issues arising from an international audience active in the field of investigating representations employed in interactive software development (ISD).