A Pictorial Describing Future Tools for Remote Design Collaboration

What is it about?

There are many tools that cater to online collaboration, but they are not often aimed at conveying and transferring tacit information during the prototyping process. In order to investigate how to exchange tacit knowledge in supporting tools, we organized two workshops with 4 design students and 4 professionals. In this paper, we present a visual report on the workshop results of how designers view the future collaboration during the prototyping process. Eight participants from different backgrounds were invited so that we could have a broader view. Four industrial design students participated in workshop 1. While in workshop 2, four design professionals who had rich experiences in collaborative design practice were invited. To help the students to understand the crucial problems during the remote collaboration, we introduced a storyboard as a starting point. After the sketch activities, we asked the participants to explain the drawings in detail.

Featured Image

Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash

Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Mixed reality is arguably a good way to support the remote collaborative prototyping process. However, we noticed that the limitation of these tools is that only the local designers have a hands-on experience. The limitation is that the remote collaborators can neither touch nor feel any tangible objects in the local designers’ space. We valued the physicality of the design ideas and the co-exploration with the physical prototypes. Therefore, supporting the shared prototyping process in the physical environment is the gap we want to contribute. Inspired by both literature and findings from the workshops, we present three initial ideas of tools.