Using situated FBS to model design interactions in a distant synchronous collaborative situation
Résumé
Design has always been a collective activity where human and social dimensions played a critical role. Today new information technologies allow distant interactions in an increasingly smooth way and designers interact more and more often through collaborative tools in their everyday work. This is mainly due to organisational factors and will certainly increase in the coming years due to the environmental consciousness of the population. The literature currently distinguishes two kinds of collaboration, i.e. synchronous and asynchronous. Both collaboration modalities are complementary and cannot exist separately. For supporting asynchronous collaboration new information systems integrate collaboration functionalities and all the modern PLM systems provide full web services allowing distant access and management of design workflows and data. Some recent works propose advanced annotation functionalities that provide support for recording some elements of the design rational (Lene et al., 2009) and the web 2.0 technologies have a critical impact on the software architecture and functionalities of our CAD systems. This is an important research issue today. In the mean time synchronous collaboration in distant design teams have seen dramatic development. Despite new software tools and synchronous environments available today, many research issues remain. In particular there are issues related to the design practice itself and design cooperation that are still not very well documented.