Spaces, Traces and Networked Design

A field study was conducted on a team of collaborating designers who used a variety of internet-based media to co-ordinate their activities. The paper focuses on their work practices, specifically those of their conversational resources in organising collaboration and structuring their workspaces for future reuse. The team was interdisciplinary and both locally (office spaces spread over a single site) and temporally (across different time zones) distributed. As well as face-to-face meetings, their resources included a shared web-space, web-development software, telephones, videoconferencing, email, Hypermail, and CAD software. Our findings demonstrate that it was not enough that the team maintained a persistent record of their communication. It was also critical that this record was archived and accessible in an appropriate media for rapid and effortless re-use, and that it be dynamically re-configurable to adapt to the team members’ changing communication and informational requirements over the project lifecycle. From the findings we develop implications for the design of persistent network-based solutions for this information referral and review.