Track:
Models for Developing Groupware in Collaborative Design
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Abstract:
The lone design genius, if not mythical or completely extinct, is surely on the endangered species list. Nowadays, significant design projects require teams of designers coordinating their varied expertise to arrive at effective design solutions. In more progressive circles, design teams do not work alone either. As the world adopts methods such as Concurrent Engineering (CE) and Total Quality Management (TQM), designers are being required to coordinate customers, marketers, production experts, maintenance staff, and all the other stakeholders likely to be affected downstream by the evolving design. Common sense responses to growing complexity and past failures are crystalizing into new organizational conventions and new design procedures. These new forms reflect a growing realization that higher quality, lower cost products can be produced more quickly if potential problems are recognized earlier in the design cycle.