A Review of Design Tools for Supporting the Remote Design Collaboration

What is it about?

As design collaboration shifts from co-located to remote, both human-computer interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) have been seeking ways to support distributed collaborative design processes. We noticed that a lot of studies focused on the early phase co-ideation process, i.e., brainstorming and sketching, while the later phase co-exploration through iterative prototyping remains relatively unexplored. Therefore, improving the remote collaborative design process remains a research challenge. This literature review elaborates on the current supporting tools and their corresponding strategies during different design practices. We contribute an overview of the design space for improving the remote collaborative design processes. Moreover, we identified gaps and opportunities for future research and tool development in the remote collaborative design process. We end this paper by concluding the insights with a research agenda for our future research.

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Photo by Edho Pratama on Unsplash

Photo by Edho Pratama on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The purpose of this review was to present an overview of the design space for improving the remote collaborative design process. As introduced, we see the co-exploration process as an important phase that has remained underexplored. We analyzed the selected papers from multiple angles, including the ways in which designers collaborated, the functions provided by these tools, the practices in which designers participated, and the ways in which these tools were evaluated. Our work identified gaps and opportunities for future research and tool development in the remote collaborative design process. For future research, we sketch out our research agenda consisting of three topics: 1) designing tools for supporting co-exploration throughout the remote collaborative design processes, 2) extending the research studies involving more phases of shared experiences, 3) considering conducting more structure-based design experiments and applying more design-related evaluation criteria.