The increasing complexity in design activities leads designers to collaborate and share knowledge within distributedteams. This makes designers use systems such as knowledge management systems to reach their goal. In this article, ouraim is to investigate on improving the use of knowledge management systems by defining a framework for modellingknowledge transfer in such context. The proposed framework is partly based on reuse of existing models found in theliterature and on a participant observation methodology. Then, we tested this framework through several case studiespresented in this article. These investigations enable us to observe, define and model more finely the knowledgedynamics that occur between knowledge workers and knowledge management systems.