Designing Software to Facilitate Shared Understanding in Collaborative Design Teams

In co-located collaborative design meetings, product designers share and exchange independently gathered or generated information with their team in order to reach a shared understanding of the design space. This allows the team to make well-informed, coordinated decisions throughout the design process. The Prodigy Project seeks to develop better tools for product designers to exchange information during shared problem and solution framing tasks. We developed two prototypes to explore the collaborative behavior of designers in collocated collaborative meetings. These prototypes allow team members to synchronously share information from a variety of sources with each other and a shared display while maintaining the natural flow of team meetings. The major contributions we make are exploring further how designers in the same physical space negotiate for attention to their devices, and how software collaboration tools can enhance existing work processes. Author