UCL Discovery

Abstract

This paper addresses a new method to describe the remote collaborative design process from the perspective of reflective practice. We aim at understanding the mutual effect between internal and external structures in remote collaborative design. According to the cognitive coding scheme of Suwa et al., we encoded the process into a set of indices—new, continual and revisited—that describe each primitive design move. In a case study which involved the authors as design collaborators, we identified the degree of dependency among these moves and developed a 3D graphical representation to account for reflective practice between us as collaborators. In this representation, we re-interpreted our collaborative process through three main axes: axis of idea exchange as lateral component, axis of idea development as vertical component, and axis of dependency as depth component. We believe this representation can be used to re-interpret the collaboration process among geographically dispersed design team members.