The role of trust in distributed design

Automated support of design teams, consisting of both human and automated systems, requires an understanding of the role of trust in distributed design processes. By explicitating trust, an individual designer’s decisions become better understood and may be better supported. Each individual designer has his or her private goals in a co-operative design setting, in which requirement conflicts and resource competitions abound. There are, however, also group goals that also need to be reached. This paper presents (1) an overview of research related to trust in the context of agents and design, (2) a computational knowledge-level model of trust based on the seven beliefs distinguished by Castelfranchi and Falcone (2000); and (3) an example of the use of the trust model in a specific design process, namely website design from the perspective of a single designer. The results are discussed in the context of distributed design in open systems.