This article, which is the result of ongoing ergonomic research, aims to shed light on the activity of design workers in the French automotive industry through the organisational uses of digital technologies. These technologies have been integrated into the activity of these workers for several decades and aim to organise the collective activity deployed throughout a design project within distributed and virtual teams. At the same time, this industrial sector is subject to multiple constraints of an economic and ecological nature, leading it to make its organisational methods more flexible in order to innovate while shortening its design times. This context of digitalisation and organisational transformation questions the individual and collective activity of synchronisation of these populations, particularly with regard to the resources and means at their disposal to preserve their room for manoeuvre and regulation strategies. Thus, two case studies were constituted through the analysis of two automotive design projects taking place in different circumstances. Indeed, one of the two projects took place during the Covid-19 health crisis, leading us to adapt our data collection methods but also to reconsider the digitalisation of this design activity, in which interactions between workers could only take place through the use of digital technologies. Thus, these two case studies address the links between the flexibilisation of individuals and organisations, on the one hand, and regulation strategies on the other, through the use of digital technologies. The results of these case studies show that the use of digital technologies, as a resource or constraint for the activity, is linked to the characteristics of the organisation in which they are deployed at two levels; these forms of organisation in projects create specific uses of these technologies and could not exist as they are without them.
