Architecturological and epistemological research on collaborative design

This paper presents an architecturological and epistemological research on collaborative design as well as scientific methodologies comparing the viewpoints of Cognitive Ergonomics and Architectur-ology on collaborative design. Architecturological research endeavours describing the cognitive activity of design through applied methodologies confronting an a priori scientific language with empirical cases. Cognitive Ergonomics builds knowledge from experimentations by observing the reality from which concepts are constituted. In a French research called CoCrea (Creative Collaboration) and financed by ANR (French National agency of Research), the two scientific fields are confronted to better know the complex mechanisms of collaboration in architectural design made with a digital collaborative space. 1 Introduction This paper presents an architecturological and epistemological research on collaboration in architectural design. It compares Cognitive Ergonomics and Applied Architecturology as two scientific methodologies studying architectural design. These two scientific fields meet together to describe and clarify the cognitive mechanisms of architectural collaborative design, in a French research called CoCrea, financed by the French Agency of National Research (ANR). 1 From questioning contemporary architectural habits and practices relatively to sharing tools, CoCrea aims to explain in the presence or remote creative collaboration in architecture. It implies three different research paradigms and three different laboratories: Cognitive Ergonomics developed at LIMSI-CNRS, Applied Archi-tecturology developed at ARIAM-LAREA and knowledge engineering and design developed at LUCID-ULg. From precedent researches on collaboration showing the need of support for remote working meetings, a Distributed Collaborative Digital Studio (DCDS) has been created by the team of LUCID-ULg. 2 This DCDS is an IT support that recreates at distant, the situation of in the presence meeting works. It has been used in CoCrea to experiment different situations of collaboration, in the presence and at distant, and to observe architectural productions made by two hands. The ex-perimentations constitute the raw material of Cognitive Ergonomics and Archi-tecturology to approach architectural collaborative design. The respective analysis methods of these two viewpoints permit to explain the specificity of each and to build epistemological knowledge on design sciences. The first part of this paper presents the CoCrea research and the experimenta