There are many different techniques in use today for the identification and evaluation of risks in new product design projects. Once identified, we need to ensure that we treat those risks in an effective manner. This process leads the project manager and his/her team into complex decision-making problems. Decisions to take a risk, reduce the level of risk or to eliminate those risks altogether are left to the project manager's judgement. Given the stakes involved in today's projects, such intuitive measures, based solely on experience, are no longer sufficient. In response to these problems and given the non-repetitive and complex nature of new product design projects, we modelled the decisionmaking process in design in accordance with systemic theories. According to Herbert Simon and his followers, we modelled the way in which the designers use their reasoning and data processing capacities to make decisions. These models, associated with real case studies, carried out on actionresearch principles enabled us to build a method that amplifies our cognitive capacities and allows us to act on the decision-making processes in design. The method involves the construction of a decision-making framework allowing the construction of a robust project satisfying both the project objectives and the team. It is complementary to risk identification methods because it facilitates the decision-making process, in particular decisions related to identified risks, which allows continuous project improvement.

This paper examines some aspects of physical-digital workspaces, focusing on multi-user, multi-touch technologies and how different workspaces impact collaboration. We introduce the concept of globally collaborative work. We chose to use case studies completed by groups of students in an engineering course to test different workspace modalities: the use of a large multi-touch table top in conjunction with a multi-touch board (vertical), the use of tablets with the multi-touch board, and finally the multi-touch board alone. The evaluation criteria are based on modes of interaction which emerge during globally collaborative work sessions: individual work, communication, coordination, cooperation and collaboration. We hypothesized that the workspaces would influence collaborative activity, expecting to see higher rates of collaboration in the table top environment than in the other two modalities studied. However, results showed less co-building and more cooperative work, as students divided their work and later attempted to negotiate a coherent product built on individual contributions. Lastly, we share a few design recommendations based on these results.

In order to reduce time to market and to master the costs, the design process of industrial companies is more and more structured. It enables collaborative design for experts integration and for improving the decision-making process. Decision making under uncertainties remains an important issue, especially at the beginning of this design process. The product performances are a common reference in collaborative design, and their management involves interactive design. In this paper, a functional analysis under uncertainties approach is proposed, as a means to improve interactive design. It enables to manage the risk of not fulfilling the required performances throughout the design process. This methodology makes it easy to link the data usually handled in engineering design (especially the technical requirements) with those handled for risk assessment (especially failure analysis). Using logical trees, the product functions and the associated chosen technologies are analyzed in terms of risk, taking account of the uncertainties that lead to risk and the potential failure that can arise.

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