Shared understanding in computer-supported collaborative design

We propose that computer-support for collaborative design requires a shared understanding of the design artifact among a design team. The development and support for this shared understanding builds on current developments and research in AI, CAD, CSCW and computational models of design. The shared understanding should be an explicit representation in order to be effectively shared. The explicit representation should comprise both a visual representation and a semantic model. In this paper we present an architecture for computer-supported collaborative design that distinguishes between a shared visual representation and a shared underlying representation. The development of the underlying representation combines graphical and semantic objects than can be abstracted and aggregated as a tangled hierarchy.