Communication In Collaborative Design Research Articles

Factors influencing communication in collaborative design

Communication between people is commonly thought to play a major role in determining the success or failure of collaborative design projects. We conducted 8 weeks of observation and 62 interviews in three design companies. Our findings indicate that communication is blamed for causing many problems which are not of obvious technical nature. However, such problems are more often symptomatic of underlying factors related to information, representation, individual, team, and organisational issues. Examples of factors influencing communication at interfaces are people's understanding of the ‘sequence of tasks’ or ‘goals and objectives’ in the design process. With a system-theory informed conceptualisation of communication, we propose that awareness of such factors could assist design practitioners in targeting interventions and researchers in generating hypotheses about communication and design performance.

Towards different communication in collaborative design

PurposeThis paper aims to create a social constructivist perspective on collaborative architecture that is complementary to the rational‐analytic perspective as embodied in the “hard” project management tools.Design/Methodology/approachTwo theoretical perspectives from the field of design methodology, “design as co‐evolution”, and “design as a social process”, form the base for an integrated perspective of collaboration. This integrated perspective describes in detail the social process among multi functional actors involved in co‐creational processes. A third theoretical framework discusses the process of maturing conflicts and conflict prevention using the integrated perspective on collaboration. Data from two empirical studies are used to illustrate both perspectives. The first study used a protocol study approach and the second a grounded approach.FindingsThis paper shows the similarities in design methodology and conflict literature by introducing a social constructivist perspective on collaborative architecture. Especially, the notion of cognitive errors as root cause of “conflictuous” situations becomes apparent. The paper describes in detail the role of perceptual differences that can make and break collaborative architecture.Practical implicationsBased on these findings some hypothetical intervention strategies are proposed that collaborating actors can apply in order to prevent “conflictuous” situations to grow beyond control and even bend those situations towards innovations. Actors engaged in multi functional and multi actor creational processes might benefit from building a rudimentary mental model representing the world of the other function or other organization.Originality/valueThe paper brings together the intra‐subjective and inter‐subjective level in the context of co‐creating (architectural) processes by combining two very different streams of literature, design methodology and maturing conflicts. In both streams one could identify a similar distinction between cognitive processes and social processes. Collaborative architecture without having social‐emotional conflicts is realized by explicating implicitly held knowledge, understandings and perceptions. An individual cognitive effort as well as a social‐interactive effort is needed in which actors explicitly discuss differences in perception before these perceptions evolve into misleading truths. As a basis for such synchronizing discussions the actors need to have some sort of rudimentary understanding of each other's thought world and trust in each other's professionalism and factuality. Thus, preventing conflicts is not about having more communication, but about different communication!

An Adaptable Model for Distributed Collaborative Design

AbstractCurrent engineering design process typically involves 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 an adaptable collaborative module for Internet-enabled Distributed Computer- Aided Design (DCAD). This module was designed based on a platform-independent model that enables designers to communicate and collaborate each other across different operation systems and applications used in dispersed locations. The adaptable module abstracts basic collaborative functionalities for a group design project and is equipped with web-based project management packages. The main research issues include platform-independency and adaptable structure, distributed design management and coordination, design process representation, collaborative design communication and design visualization. The adaptable model makes the collaborative design plug-in and add-on can be developed flexibly and loaded to differ...

Coding and modelling communication in architectural collaborative design

Although there has been some research done on collaborative face-to-face (FTF) and video-conferencing sessions involving architects, little is known about the effects these different media have on collaborative design in general and on collaborative communication and design representation in particular. In this paper, we argue that successful computer-mediated collaborative design (CMCD) does not necessarily mean emulating close-proximity environments. In order to investigate this view, we carried out experiments examining the effect and significance of different communication channels in collaborative sessions between architects. The experiments were conducted in different environments and classified into three categories. The first category is FTF. The second, CMCD sessions with full communication channels, CMCD-a. The third category was conducted also through CMCD sessions but with limited communication channels, CMCD-b. A custom coding scheme is developed using data, external and theoretically derived coding categories as a base. Examples of how the proposed coding scheme works are given from all three categories of experiments. The coding scheme provides the basis for modelling and understanding communication in collaborative design.

The multiuser workspace as the medium for communication in collaborative design

The design process requires collaboration between organizations and individuals. This paper considers recent research in collaborative design system, called the multiuser workspace. The group-oriented multiuser workspace is a design environment where the collaborative work progresses smoothly between participants in the architecture design process. The design in the multiuser workspace is processed while participants interact with each other. This paper describes the research project concerning the multiuser workspace with interuniversity collaboration, shows the possibility of the multiuser workspace and investigates its problems.

Exploring communication in collaborative design: co-operative architectural modelling

An exploration of communication in collaborative design from the perspective of co-operative architectural modelling is reported. The objectives and problems of communication in collaborative design are described and anaysed by viewing design as, basically, disciplines of modelling complex objects. Three cases of teamwork in architectural modelling are studied, each demonstrating a rich and informative approach to collaboration. Looking at the cases from the co-operative modelling perspective, important conditions for communication are observed: firstly, the participation and co-ordination among heterogeneous systems of representation and action that individual members of a design team work with; and secondly, the interconnection between common goals shared by all participants and domain-oriented goals pursued by individuals. In exploring how the conditions were met, it was found useful to characterize communication in terms of the inter-relations between common images and distributed design developments. Two generic patterns of communication in collaborative design were found, which suggest two alternative conceptual frameworks for developing computational representations.