Deploying and Evaluating Collaborative Engineering Studios

In the following, we describe our vision of a collaborative engineering environment, the Collaborative Design Studio, consider issues and questions relating to the effective design and evaluation of such systems, and describe proposed studies for evaluating and evolving the current environment. This work is being undertaken at the Geometric and Intelligent Computing Laboratory at Drexel University. While preliminary development of the studio has proceded using relatively informal input from professional design engineers, we feel it is essential to incorporate direct evaluation by intended users of the system to ensure that it accurately meets their needs and fits into their work environment. Such information will be obtained through surveys and observation of subjects as they complete specified tasks, analyzed, and used to guide further development of the system.