Reaiah Brown: Creating a Visual Language for Visualizing Argumentation and Large Design Spaces

Reaiah Brown and Pauline JoJo Chang participated in the 2005 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Information and Technology (SURF-IT) under the guidance of Professor Jim Whitehead. They developed a visual language for visualizing argumentation and large-scale design spaces, and applied that visual language to the consideration of a manned-mission to Mars.

Large-scale complex problems may be too overwhelming to understand right away, let alone to visualize and consider each option. Visual languages exist in computerized form to help viewers visually lay out each argument as part of a larger debate. However, as computer screens have limited size, the facility to see different arguments at once may be compromised. In addition, although the visual languages may provide formats to display argumentation, they are usually unable to display large design spaces. As today's efforts also require technical considerations, it is imperative to develop a visual language to simultaneously display argumentation and large-scale design spaces. The paper form opposed to computer screens is chosen as a display option.

The developed visual language by Reaiah and JoJo is currently applied to aspects of a potential manned-mission to Mars with success. The argumentation aspect of the mission is whether or not we should attempt to send a manned-mission to Mars. Several design spaces are considered, such as the type of spacecraft, fuel, and crew considerations, and the overall cost of the mission. The argumentation and design spaces are displayed on large posters designed using Microsoft Visio.

Future work would be to conduct user studies to further gauge the effectiveness of the visual language, and to create a Wiki project such that others may also contribute to the project. Reaiah and JoJo will create a project on Dforge and upload their files there for further use and development.