Enhanced and Continuously Connected Environment for Collaborative Design

This paper describes our current study in the development of a collaborative design environment which considers Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and architectural space. Our study group has been developing a computerized prototype environment for collaboration, which attempts to support a synchronous design collaboration in a face-to-face meeting at a local site and also in a continuously connected project-room at distributing sites. The authors focus on communication in order to evaluate the collaboration environment. The objectives of this study are listed below: Objective 1. The evaluation of using the multi-screen and sharing console applications in the face-to-face design meeting at the local site. Objective 2. Finding problems and its factors of the continuously connected project-rooms in the distributing sites. In our conclusion, we have verified the relation between the communication and the applications of the environment in the objective 1. With the objective 2, we have realized and extracted four major issues towards improving the distributing project-rooms environment in our future study.