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The observation of designers' behaviour in collaborative design activities and the analysis of protocols improved the understanding of how novel ideas emerge, what occurs among designers and, indirectly, what methods have a good impact on the outcomes. Yet, protocol analysis requires recording the design sessions, often in a simulated environment, thus introducing a bias in the observation. Moreover, the analysis takes up to 1000 times the duration of the observed design session. These limitations definitely hinder the scalability of this practice to large experiments in real operational environments.This paper investigates the possibility to use the data collected in log files, automatically recorded during collaborative design sessions assisted by an ICT design support tool, as a means to extract relevant information about the design process and ultimately to infer insights about co-designers' cognition during the session. In this perspective, the paper proposes a set of metrics tailored to an Augmented Reality-based collaborative design tool. The study has been carried about by processing the data collected in 5 real case studies conducted in three different design companies.

SAR provides an unobtrusive implementation of AR and enables multiple stakeholders to observe and interact with an augmented physical model. This is synonymous with co-design activities and hence, there is a potential for SAR to have a significant impact in the way design teams may set-up and run their co-design activities in the future. Whilst there are a growing number of studies which apply SAR to design activities, few studies exist that examine a particular element of a design activity in a controlled manner. This paper will begin to fill this gap through the controlled study of SAR and its effects on the communication between participants of a co-design activity. To do so the paper compares a controlled design session, using more traditional methods of design representations (3D models on a screen), to sessions run using SAR. The sessions are then analysed to gather information on the gestures used by the participants as well as the overall efficiency of the participants at completing the set design task. The paper concludes that the data gathered tentatively supports a link between the use of SAR and improved communication between design session participants.