2005 Volume 20 Issue 1 Pages 109
The author has proposed a method for knowledge creation called "Knowledge Liquidization and Crystallization", and has developed a system called "Knowledge Nebula Crystallizer" to support the process Though several theories about knowledge creation have been proposed and companies have realized their importance, most of the companies face to difficulty of applying them to their real practices The aim of this study is to establish a method for supporting concept articulation in knowledge management processes in a real practice and a system to support it Knowledge has been regarded as something formalizable and universally sharable However, Knowledge is not something "solid" but "liquid". Rather, it is something like "liquid" It takes any shape to fit to a certain context, and a portion of it is extracted and fused into new knowledge that fits to a new context Exhibition design was selected as an application of our method In this paper the author describes the application of the proposed method and system The system is named "Knowledge Nebula Crystallizer for Exhibition Design (KNC4ED) " Evaluation on the method and the system based on user studies and discussions with professional exhibition designers is also described The contributions of this study are - Though researches on knowledge creation processes have been conducted for their theoretical aspects, the author has proposed and developed a method and a system to enable the processes based on the research results including knowledge management, creativity support, Human-Computer Interaction, and wearable computers - The author has applied the method and the system to the realworld design problem, i e, exhibition design Through the user studies, the author has observed that the method and system have supported the process of knowledge creation - The validity of the method and the system for practical applications have been proved through the discussions with the senior manager and the senior designer at the advertising company The result of this study is applicable not only to the exilibition design field but also to the other business practices