- 1 - Conflict Resolution in Cooperative Design

Complex modern-day artifacts are designed by groups of experts, each with their own areas of expertise. Current approaches to group design are often serial and iterative in nature, which can be time-consuming as well as leading to poor designs that are expensive to realize. New models for cooperative group design, which emphasize the parallel interaction of the design experts involved, are needed. A central issue in cooperative group design concerns how conflicts among different experts can be resolved as the design is being produced. This paper proposes a model for how such conflict resolution can take place, and describes the results of a study aimed at verifying and instantiating this model by examining conflict resolution among human experts in the domain of architectural design. The study yielded four main conclusions: (1) conflict resolution plays a central role in cooperative design, (2) a rich collection of domain-independent conflict resolution expertise can be identified, (3) we need to represent the design rationale to support conflict resolution, and (4) knowledge acquisition in cooperative design presents special challenges and requires special techniques. We include a description of the conflict resolution expertise we uncovered.