Characterisation of Collaborative Design and Interaction Management Activities in a Distant Engineering Design Situation

This paper presents an empirical research to study synchronous and asynchronous collaborative design in a technology-mediated situation. In this experiment we wanted to create a design situation where four distant designers had to communicate using commercial software and standard hardware configurations. Our methodological approach gave us the opportunity to examine two main lines of research questions concerning: (1) the specificities of technology-mediated design meetings that contrast to those of face-to-face design meetings; (2) the differences between synchronous and asynchronous collaborative work in mediated design engineering situations. Our approach stresses on some important aspects related to the management of the synchronous activity in a distant mediated situation. The originality of the approach relies on the hybrid characterization of both solution and problem management on one hand, and activity management (e.g. speech turns, meeting agenda) on the other hand.