Implications and Potential of Real-time Collaboration for the Design Process

Efficient collaboration among designers is essential for the development process of new concepts and products. Recently, software solutions have become available which support collaboration by allowing distributed editing of documents and data models. Thereby, the involved clients are synchronized in real-time. In contrast to conventional collaborative data management solutions, which use local copies that are occasionally consolidated with a central data repository, the real-time collaboration capability allows designers to work quasi on the same data at the same time. Thus, the efficiency of the design process can be improved as information conflicts are avoided and disagreements among developers become apparent as soon as possible. In this paper we use typical application scenarios and modes of real-time collaboration in aircraft design to define an architecture of extension components for enabling existing tools and process models to leverage the potential of real-time collaboration on the efficiency of the design process. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of the real-time collaboration capability on the individual workflow of designers and the coordination of collaborative design activities and speculate how it influences the willingness of designers to share data and synchronize their work.