What Do Strokes Teach Us about Collaborative Design?

This paper shows that understanding collaborative design goes beyond analyzing group dynamics, tasks’ repartitions or negotiation during decision-making processes. During the preliminary phases of design, the intentions of a designer are mainly supported by its sketches and more particularly by specific graphic units inside those sketches. Inside a controlled setting, twelve professional designers are asked to express, share, capture or interpret sketches. A qualitative and quantitative fine-grained analysis of strokes teach us • how designers tend to deal with representations that are not theirs, as in an ecological collaborative situation; • what main graphical key-features constitute the crucial essence of the shared information; • how and when is this graphic essence ready to be shared with collaborators.