COLLABORATIVE DESIGN PROJECT

The background to this project was when an email was submitted to the Industrial Design Forum ([email protected]) suggesting an on-line mailing-list ID workshop. The idea being that once the designers involved in the project had identified and established a suitable design brief, to which potentially everyone subscribing to the ID list would have an input, on-line presentations including background research, concept sketches, models, renderings, technical drawings, and so on could be posted to the on-line workshop. The project would then run its course during which discussions and decisions would be made on the development of the project resulting in a truly global solution.

This idea happened to be very close to a project proposal, which was under development at the same time by the authors, in which globally distributed designers could be brought together to work on the same design project over the Internet. A truly global collaboration commenced shortly afterwards, and BSCW was proposed as a suitable medium for the collaborative design project.

BSCW (Basic Support for Co-operative Work) developed by GMD FIT (http://

orgwis.gmd.de/), a form of CSCW (Computer Supported Co-operative Work), supports group work over the Internet by offering ‘shared workspaces’. These workspaces offer many possibilities including the uploading and downloading of documents, the addition of group members and web sites, and the distribution of information within groups or teams (Figure 1). BSCW was quickly and enthusiastically agreed as a simple and effective medium for the collaborative project by all members of the design team.

3 http://www.theglobe.com/chat/rapturecafe/entry/

4 http://power.eccosys.com/WB/

5 http://www.talk.com/pixeltoy/index.html

6 http://www.microsurf.com/WebDraw/

Collaborative design team structure

The importance of effective and efficient co-operation and communication of knowledge and information between members of design teams and the role this plays in the overall success of the product design and development process is well acknowledged (Bush and Frohman, 1991; Meerkamm, 1997).

During the early discussions of the collaborative design project three to four individuals expressed a keen interest, whilst many other IDFORUM members expressed real fears and reservations about such a project. The majority of these fears were related to issues such as Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), credit for design ideas, and payment. These issues did not dissuade many individuals from expressing an interest in the project, however, and the BSCW collaborative design team, at present, now comprises twelve designers from various geographical locations throughout the world (Figure 2). Four designers (RL, EO, JV, SM) are located in the USA, three in Australia (CH, CF, PH), two in Canada (MD, LG), two in the UK (PR, AH), and one in India (AL).

The design team consists of designers with a wide variety of backgrounds and interests including medical and rehabilitation equipment design, packaging and graphic design, toy design, architecture and exhibition design. Particular specialist areas covered by team members include manufacturing methods and production techniques, marketing, and psychology. The project members are based in a number of employment scenarios including government organisations, consultancy groups, freelance work, and education.

Figure 1 BSCW workspace

Design problem

A design problem was identified and submitted to the collaborative workspace approximately one week after the initial discussions began. The design problem originated from one of the design team members (EO), located in the USA, after she observed and discovered problems ‘first hand’ carrying heavy loads up stairs.

The initial design problem statement set, and agreed by all members involved in the project as a non-trivial problem worthy of investigation, reads: “There is a need for low cost, low tech-high function, good looking elevation devices that can get people and things up and down interior or exterior stairs. This is especially problematic in existing buildings that have a variety of conditions. For example, if you’re an artist with a studio on the 4th floor of a walk-up, hauling 100 pounds of clay is tough. If you have a broken leg, it’s another problem that might have a similar solution”.

From this initial problem statement, the design project progressed through many stages. The iterative stages and some of the tasks undertaken in the collaborative design process, to date, are outlined in Figure 3. Here, the shaded boxes define the stages the project has progressed through (to date) whilst the non-shaded boxes are stages yet to be reached. Further stages of the process such as manufacturing, marketing, product costing, and selling are purposely not included in the figure.

Figure 2 BSCW collaborative design team

Problem exploration

Problem exploration, sometimes referred to as clarification of the task [Pahl and Beitz], involves collecting information about the requirements that have to be fulfilled by the product, and also about the constraints and their relative importance. The end result of this task is an objectives or requirements list. The design problem here has been explored and developed further since the initial problem was set. For example, one designer (PH) suggested that the problem could be extended to include: “…carrying the load over very rough terrain...which may require some level of self adjustment for the changing conditions…”

Several other group members (SM, MD, PR, AL) explored the problem statement by developing and describing specific aspects of the problem statement, such as load, terrain anticipated, motion. This is illustrated below: “…load—

volume, weight, centre of gravity, liquid, solid, sheets, blocks, pellets… …terrain—

pavement, cobblestones, ramps, stairs, rough, slippery, wet, rubbery…

…motion—forward, backward, sideways, crawling, jumping, rolling, floating…”.

One of the other designers (EO) explored more specific areas of the problem by asking other group members to define certain parts of the problem statement:

“…some thoughts about ‘low cost’ and ‘low tech’—this is pretty subjective, and these figures assume some volume of production to achieve this lower cost. I think that anything under $ 1,000 for equipment that can be installed in a building or on a site and can carry stuff is ‘low cost’. For anything that can carry a person, installed in a building or on a site, $5,000 is ‘low cost’. For a portable device, it may have to be $500 or lower. But this has the potential to be something more… I am less sure about this. Regarding ‘low tech’—I’d love some discussion about this.

What are options for powering?…”.

As the problem statement developed, conjectures thrown up for consideration by the design team members included concepts based on existing products that they either had first hand experience of using, or could recall from personal memory. This is interesting as it concurs with the broad view that designers rely heavily on their past knowledge and experiences during problem exploration, and also when proposing initial ideas that attempt to meet the problem (Duffy and Kerr, 1993; Goker and Birkhofer, 1995).

Figure 3 BSCW collaborative design process (to date)

The analysis of design knowledge and information currently available, and various activities pertaining to the problem exploration stage, including a patent search was carried out by one of the designers (SM) to ensure that no possible reinvention would occur, and also to see if there were any immediate improvements that could be made to existing solutions. A very brief summary of the results from the patent search, using IBM’s U.S. patent Database (http://patent.womplex.ibm.com/boolquery.html), is given in Table 1. Similarly, two other members of the design team (PR, CH) conducted an Internet search for information on competitor and like products. A small selection of the results of this market analysis are shown in Figure 4.

The main outcome from the problem exploration stage was a formal definition of what was required of the load carrying device. Requirements of the load carrying device were submitted to the shared workspace by several designers (MD, SM, EO, CH, PR, LG, PH, AL), and summarised in a objectives tree. The objectives tree for the load carrying device is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 4 Examples of load carrier competitor products

Table 1 IBM patent search results for “Load Carrier” query

Concept design

Concept design involves the generation of ideas usually represented in a suitable form, such as a design sketch, diagram, or scale model. This highly iterative stage involves the generation of ideas (synthesis), and the checking or evaluation of those ideas against the objectives or requirements (analysis). The objectives tree (Figure 5) was used as a basis for firstly generating and secondly evaluating the concept design ideas. The guidelines for brainstorming ideas, suggested by Cross (1994), were used during this activity. These are as follows:

• no criticism is allowed during brainstorming;

• a large quantity of ideas is wanted;

• seemingly crazy ideas are wanted;

• keep all ideas short and snappy;

• try to combine and improve upon the ideas of others.

Figure 5 Load carrier objectives tree

The concept design ideas generated by the group members, to date, have taken three forms:

• concept design text-based descriptions;

• concept design sketches;

• 3-D computer models.

The reason for the disparity in formats is due to the fact that some members of the design team found difficulty in sending their concept sketches to the BSCW workspace, and relied instead upon sending textual descriptions of their ideas by email. A selection of early text-based concept ideas submitted by their designers are given below: “(MD)…ski lifts (chair lifts, gondolas), grain elevator, conveyer belt, catapults, slingshots etc……air systems that are used to move large machinery (several tons)…(LG)…waddling cartoon-type figure rocking side to side... …walking horse where the back “leg” swings forward when the horse rocks forward - textured back feet grab the floor and stay there, while the front feet are not textured and slide the whole horse forward…(AL)…saddle-like device that hangs of the stair banister and can be cranked……wicker basket seat slung under a wood log carried by two able persons…(CH)…three wheels arranged with their axes at the points of a triangle on each end of an axle……pedal powered stair climber… …arm pumped ratchet device……donkey at the top or bottom of a hill driving an endless loop of rope to which you attach buckets of cargo…”.

A selection of some of the early concept design sketches submitted by design team members are illustrated in Figure 6.

Here, three concept sketches of differing levels of representation are shown. The concept on the left depicts a caterpillar track load carrier driven by a battery or electrical power source. The middle concept shows a powered stair climbing device (optional power source) which rotates about the axle allowing the device to ‘flip’

onto the higher step. The concept on the right of the three illustrates a simple

‘wheelbarrow-style’ load lifter with hydraulically-powered bars (optional) to assist lifting.

Figure 6 Load carrier concept sketches

Collaborative design project summary

To date, the collaborative design project has successfully progressed through a number of design stages and activities. The activities undertaken include the identification and definition of a problem, problem exploration, market analysis, patent searches, and concept synthesis and analysis. However, the project is now currently at a crucial stage. Key issues such as determining the intended market for the product, the product retail cost target, methods of manufacture, and other details of the product specification have to be agreed.

To this juncture BSCW has facilitated effective collaboration and communication between the group members. However, it is clear that face-to-face meetings are now required, that will provide the appropriate level of communication ‘richness’ (Daft and Lengel, 1984), to resolve some of the more key issues mentioned above. This is obviously impossible, so an Internet-based communication tool which provides a high level of ‘richness’ is required. Currently the group members are investigating the use of ICQ, an Internet communication tool (http://www.mirabilis.com/icqme.html), as a method for enabling ‘real time’

chat to address some of the project issues which have arisen.