Research on Social-Technical System for Project Oriented Collaborative Product Design

Abstract

Collaborative design of project oriented product involves not only the multidisciplinary knowledge synergy technology and cooperative managing technology of multiple design processes, but also the organization that puts the collaborative design into practice. Collaborative design is a complicate social-technology system which reflects product cognition process and the social relations of design teams. Based on the theory of systems engineering, a three dimensional description system of collaborative design is presented in this paper: disciplinary dimension, design process dimension and organization dimension. A spiral model of collaborative design process is proposed to express the reciprocity between disciplinary dimension and design process dimension. Design organization is viewed as the core of the social-technology system of collaborative design. The organization is depicted with class diagram. Researching collaborative design from the view point of socio-technical system, research field of design methodology is extended and it is beneficial to design methodologys guidance for complex product design, which also lays a solid foundation for further study on knowledge management in collaborative design.