Abstract
The potential benefits of recording the argumentation and debate surrounding different types of decision making have been recognised in architectural design, the authoring of building regulations, and environmental policy formulation, all of which bear some relation to activities which occur in urban planning and design. Access to argumentation, it is claimed, should explain why decisions were taken and so has the capacity to inform both the revision of existing urban policies and the formulation of new strategies. However, recording argumentation is not without its problems. For example, it is now clear that to document debate in useful detail is a considerable overhead for users. Furthermore, most existing argumentation schemes (e.g., the Issue-Based Information System and Toulmin's structures for arguments) have proved difficult for non-specialists to understand. The development of suitable groupware may help to alleviate some of these problems by reducing the burden of capturing arguments in a computer-based system. To do this will require clear understandings of how decisions are made collectively, the information flows which lead to decisions and interactions between different members of the same group and different groups. This paper will address these fundamental issues with the aim of establishing directions for development of future collaborative argumentation systems.
Published Version
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