Cognitive factors in distributed design

Engineering design is being carried out by distributed design teams in an effort to use expert human resources more efficiently. The support needs of distributed design are reviewed from a cognitive viewpoint using five broad categories: design methodology, collaboration, teamwork, knowledge management and design representation. Web-based implementation of iterative, structured design methodologies allow greater accessibility to tools and methodologies and more consistent interfaces. Collaboration requires successful and efficient sharing of knowledge, negotiation, coordination and management of activities. In distributed environments, organizational factors and decisions that foster teamwork must be mediated by technology. Design intent, rationale and history are important basic types of knowledge that knowledge management systems are required to capture, organize and manipulate to help generate new design knowledge. Efficient methods of representing design artefacts in different forms are needed that allow designers to interact most efficiently as well as support knowledge capture, transformation and collaborative activities. # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.