Viewpoint Management for Cooperative Design

This paper aims to make intelligible some important notions such as « Viewpoint » and « Correlation of Viewpoints » and to show the necessity to take into account these notions in order to analyze any cooperative design activity or to support it. After a brief introduction, Section 2 describes our model of Viewpoint based on an argumentative approach of the design activity and five types of Design Viewpoints. Section 3 introduces our model of correlation between design viewpoints. Finally after a short state of the art in section 4, Section 5 concludes first on the importance of taking into account the heterogeneity of a group of users, in particular, their viewpoints in « design groupware » or more generally in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and, secondly on future work. 1 The work presented in this article has been done in collaboration with Tufan Orel at INRIA-Sophia-Antipolice (1995-1996) and was partly funded by CNES (National Center of Space Studies) as a contract on « Study of Dynamic Viewpoints » (R&T Action D3103/03). We would like to acknowledge the participation of three CNES designers in our viewpoint-based experimentation.