Synergy

Abstract

Current product design projects typically involve more than one designer. In many cases there will be a team of designers participating in the design, along with the corresponding clients. This paper introduces a collaborative design environment focused to assist professional product designers when in remote collaboration during the early stages of the design process. This environment was designed on a platform-independent model that enables product designers to communicate and collaborate with each other across different operating systems and networks. The prototype consists of a series of synchronous and asynchronous collaborative tools, recording mechanisms, brainstorming tools, data mining features and project management services that enable professional product designers to collaborate, cooperate and coordinate on a design project. The main research issues include platform independency and customizability; distributed design management and coordination, design process representation, collaborative design communication and design visualization. Professional product designers and academics have tested the proposed environment successfully in a series of real-time use case scenarios.