Supporting Collaborative Design by Digital Tools - Potentials and Challenges

Modern product engineering is characterised by distributed teams working on different subsystems and components at different times in different knowledge domains. On the one hand, this distributed development enables flexibility with regard to experts' know-how; on the other hand, it results in an enhanced effort for coordination tasks and information exchange between the partners involved. However, these tasks are less supported in collaboration of small and medium size enterprises and therefore often result in an interface-based development rather than a collaborative design. The application of modern digital tools for information representation and exchange as well as the use of design methods in distributed teams can support a wide range of the tasks needed for a successful collaboration. However, new competencies with regard to technical or methodical issues as well as socioemotional competencies of the designers are required to enable an efficient work among the team members and gain the advantages of collaborative design. In order to develop a concept for the support of collaborative design using digital tools, this paper addresses the following research questions: what does the collaborative work look like, nowadays, and which potentials and challenges result from this increasing digitalisation of work? What kinds of competencies are required to ensure an effective collaboration from both the personal and the process point of view? Subsequently, this paper proposes an approach to support collaborative teams in a methodical way. This approach is based on a model including three views upon collaborative design, namely process-view, technical-methodical-view and personal view.