A Design Language for Virtual Design Studio

The Virtual Design Studio is comprised of a team of designers from various locations for which the communication is computer-mediated. It allows participants who are geographically dispersed to interact in a design environment and collaborate on the same project without leaving their own environment. The ever-increasing frequency of distant engineering requires an efficient and common language to communicate in a productive manner, regardless of the team members’ cultural origin or geographical location. The main communication problem arises in the early stages of the design process, particularly when brainstorming is carried on a design problem. It is believed that “the effectiveness of the environment depends on how well its visual representations fit the mental representations and strategies of the designers” [1]. Therefore, the challenge is to develop a design language that minimizes the misunderstandings by an explicit and formal representation which includes both the visual representation and functional and structural decompositions of the design. An experimental Virtual Design Studio between the Middle East Technical University (TURKEY) and Union College (USA) was initiated in 1996 [2, 3]. This paper summarizes the work carried out at the Middle East Technical University, towards developing a design language and a software package, which uses the Internet technology and provides a common design language for the Virtual Design Studio participants at educational level [4].