Towards an integration of the cooperative design context in collaborative tools

In a design project, the actors cooperate to achieve a same objective, which can be the production of a document, a manufactured product, a plane or a building. The role of a cooperative project management tool is to offer each actor not only a good vision of the project development but also the extent of his action potential. The cooperation context of a design project is a relational organization where each actor keeps up specific relations with other people (designers, project managers, etc.) but also with documents and activities. This organization has to be represented in the project management tool to give each user an adaptive vision of the project organization and development. We propose a representation and a visualization of such a context, which characterizes each design project.