Supporting Collaborative Design with Integrated Knowledge-Based Design Environments

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This research is funded under the Special Initiative on Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology. This is one of eleven winners under that competition. The goal of this project is to develop a conceptual framework and a prototype system for collaboration in an asynchronous mode among members of design teams. The proposed design environments include knowledge-based and graphic construction components with issue-based hypermedia systems designed to support collaboration. The application domain for the prototype system is the design of communications networks within buildings. The complexity of such projects forces large and heterogeneous groups to work together over long periods of time. The large and growing discrepancy between in amount of potentially relevant knowledge for the design task and the amount any one designer can know and remember puts limits on progress in design. Overcoming this limit is a central challenge for developers of systems that support both individual and collaborative design efforts. The work in this project builds on previous developments embodied in the FRAMER system for the design of human-computer interfaces and the JANUS system for architectural design.