Developing and evaluating collaborative engineering studios

We discuss a vision of a work in progress on a collaborative engineering environment, the Collaborative Design Studio, being developed at the Geometric and Intelligent Computing Laboratory at Drexel University. This works seeks to integrate Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and communication tools through automatic extraction and embedding of design contest into communications, as well as provide archiving and retrieval of informal communications. While preliminary development of the studio has proceeded using relatively informal input from professional design engineers, direct evaluation by intended users of the system will be sought to guide further developments of the system to ensure that it accurately meets their needs and fits into their work environment. Such formative user input will be obtained through surveys and observations of subjects as they complete specified tasks. Future summative evaluation will attempt to measure changes in user productivity and efficiency. Discussion focuses on issues and questions relating to the effective design and evaluation of such systems, and describe proposed studies for evolving the current environment.