The Nature of Collaboration in Computer Supported Designing

The purpose of the present study was to examine how a web-based networked learning environment (Future Learning Environment, FLE-Tools) supported collaborative designing. We organized a course in which teams of first-year university level textile students (N=31) solved an authentic and complex design task with the help of the collaborative environment. A problem addressed in the study was to examine -beyond the general nature of the participants' design process -how intensively design teams collaborated and how different teams organized their collaborative design process. The results of the study indicated that the networked environment elicited collaborative designing by helping the teams to share their design ideas and relevant design knowledge. Intensity of collaboration, however, varied between the teams; i.e., members on one team only coordinated their efforts without producing a shared design object; five teams engaged in intensive cooperation by partially sharing their design objects and devoting a moderate proportion of their message content to organizing their collaboration; and, finally, four teams took part in very intensive collaboration by developing a joint design object and engaging in an intensive process organization. A design challenge of FLE-Tools is to develop new tools and practices that would help each design team to organize the design processes and jointly construct, develop, visualize, and further elaborate shared design objects.