Evaluating the Use of Digital Technologies to Support Design Collaboration

Collaboration is particularly important for complex design and construction projects that often involve large and diverse professional and end-user stakeholder groups. Digital technologies have been found to be able to improve the collaborative process in these projects. However, currently there is still a lack of critical understanding about the effectiveness of different digital technologies, especially the emerging ones, during design collaboration. This chapter adopts a cognitive approach to studying different digital technologies in supporting design collaboration via comparison of two different types of collaborative technologies—a 3D modelling environment and an immersive design environment, benchmarking them against a more traditional face-to-face collaborative design environment, as well as comparing between two types of collaboration team dynamics (namely, experts with non-experts, and experts with other experts). The results of this preliminary study show that differences in design collaboration behaviour were apparent when compared across the three design environments, and the collaborative design behaviours of the two types of teams showed differences in collaborative practices related to Expertise, Organising Mechanisms, Problem Solving, and Shared Goals. It is suggested that designers can maintain comparable effort during collaborating and designing in the immersive 3D design environment as they do in the typical 3D modelling design environment.