Supporting Decision Making in CSCW Design

Design for emerging technologies such as ubiquitous computing, calm technology and Grid computing requires knowledge and expertise from different disciplines. Such knowledge helps to improve our individual information processing resources and thus overcome our limitations. However, integrating design knowledge and expertise of different team members coming from different disciplines is a complex task. Today, we are facing two problems. Firstly, how to enable the multidisciplinary design team to solve problems given the need to build common ground amongst team members? Secondly, how to structure the information which is held about projects so that issues can be progressed and resolved, in particular those arising as a result of the diversity of team members. In this paper, we propose an approach based on common ground theory and IBIS (Issue Based Information System) to address issues encountered by the multidisciplinary team and to enable the decision making process. We also provide a means of evaluating the approach by using statistical analysis.