Acquiring information from linkography in protocol studies of designing

This paper proposes methods to acquire information from linkography in protocol studies. The paper commences with an introduction of linkography together with its use and then presents two cases of collaborative designing. A qualitative analysis of these cases and their linkographs is presented. Two different strategies to abstract information from the linkographs are described: one based on clustering and the other based on Shannon's entropy. The abstracted information is interpreted and mapped to the qualitative analysis of the protocols. The results are promising; cluster analysis is able to group the linkograph into meaningful clusters, while entropy measures the opportunities for idea development of a team and can also reflect the opportunistic contributions of individual participants.