Build in Progress

Tiffany Tseng developed Build in Progress during her doctoral research at the MIT Media Lab. Her project archive dates the work to 2012–2016.

A branching process map connected individual steps with a detailed view containing text, images, video and design files. It offered a way to document experiments, ask for advice and make the path through a project visible.

The 2014 study by Tiffany Tseng, Maria Yang and Stephen Ruthmann followed 22 undergraduate music-education students in six teams over three weeks. Teams designed low-cost musical construction kits and activities, tested prototypes outside their group, and documented their work on shared project pages.

Students chose how to organize their process maps. Branches could represent different parts of a kit, activities, team members’ contributions or alternative designs. The researchers analyzed all six project pages and gathered survey and interview responses from two teams.

A central challenge was deciding what belonged in a public account. Documentation often became instructions for reproducing the finished project, leaving out experiments and mistakes. The study examines how an online representation can make design work visible while also shaping what people choose to record.

Documentation in Progress: Challenges With Representing Design Process Online

Tiffany Tseng, Maria Yang and Stephen Ruthmann (2014). ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE 2014). Paper DETC2014-34686, article V003T04A027.

Read the author-hosted paper (PDF) ↗ · Publication DOI ↗

The publication credits S. Alex Ruthmann as Stephen Ruthmann.

The original Build in Progress service is no longer available, according to its creator’s archive. Selected project examples and documentation remain accessible through that archive, and the web application source is public.

Tiffany Tseng’s project case study ↗ · Public platform source ↗ · MusEDLab publications →