Sharing of Ideas in a Collaborative CAD for Conceptual Embodiment Design Stage

CAD systems being used now are designed mainly to be used by single users for routine designs and conducting engineering analysis on those designs. In this paper we propose a CAD system that is used to facilitate the conceptual-embodiment design stage in a collaborative manner. This system will enable designers to efficiently exchange their ideas during the early design stages through updating other designers with the progress of other designers. This means that designers are free to choose their own design paths and then converge the design into a chosen design that they deemed best for the problem at hand. This approach is designed such that the creativity of each designers can be showcased while simultaneously limiting the resources that are used in designing each potential solutions. Lastly, we will also show the further planned development for the proposed system. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.