A Design Support Environment for Collaborative Spaces Blending Practice and Education

In recent years there has been a public interest in collaborative spaces (in other words, “Ba”) under the term “Knowledge Management” or “Knowledge Management System”. Collaborative spaces encourage organizational members (e.g. employee) to acquire or create important organizational intellects (e.g. knowledge) through group activities (e.g. a free discussion). Good design of the collaborative space is a key for organization to grow. In this paper we focus on design of the collaborative spaces on a knowledge management system and aim to improve the quality of collaborative space. To achieve the goal, we have been building collaborative space ontology as a rational design principle and a foundation of the environment, and developing a design environment of the collaborative space which provides a designer with design guideline and support functions based on the collaborative space ontology. The design environment supports a designer of a collaborative space through two phases. The first phase is to crystallize design intentions, and the second phase is to inform the intention to the participants, by sending a message which explains about the collaborative space together with its design intention.