Understanding Virtual Design Studios

Abstract

Abstract.There are numerous approaches and techniques for setting up an environment for collaborative design. The most common approach is to extend the desktop environment to include tools for meeting and sharing files. This approach takes the individual work environment and adds tools for communicating with others. An alternative approach is to create a virtual world environment in which the collaborators meet, work, and organise their projects. This approach differs conceptually because it creates a sense of place that is unique to the project, sort of a shared office space. A variation on this approach is to create a virtual world that is the model of the product being designed. This is a more obvious choice when the product is an architectural design, but it can be extended to other kinds of design. This approach is essentially collaborating within the design. We present the three approaches and comment on their strengths and weaknesses.

The virtual design studio on the cloud: a blended and distributed approach for technology-mediated design education

“…Early virtual design studios utilized multi-user dungeons and multi-user dungeons object-oriented (Maher, Skow, and Cicognani 1999), as well as specially designed software that combined synchronous and asynchronous approaches (Kolarevic et al 2000). Later, 3D virtual worlds such as Active Worlds (Maher and Simoff 1999;Rosenman et al 2007), SecondLife (Gu et al 2009), and immersive virtual environments (Schnabel and Kvan 2001) were used in virtual design studios.…”

Interdisciplinarity: perceptions of the value of computer-supported collaborative work in design for the built environment

“…Multidisciplinary working is rich in information; interdisciplinary working is also rich in interpretation and transformation. It represents greater synergistic activity and it comes closer to offering the 'shared understanding' between participants as referred to by other CSCW researchers (see for example Maher, Simoff & Cicognani, 1999). Edmonds & Candy (1999) have noted the significant influence that computer based media have on creative thinking and particularly the emergence of ideas but there is still much research to do on the potential for CSCW to support and improve creative interdisciplinary working.…”

Multimedia Mining of Collaborative Virtual Workspaces: An Integrative Framework for Extracting and Integrating Collaborative Process Knowledge

“…The ways of structuring of the environment's space depend on a number of factors, including the ontology (what kind of place the environment is), purpose of the environment, the embedded functionality, the preferred communication and collaboration mode [14], underlying technologies and their integration [18]. Figure 3 illustrates the topology of a design environment, predefined by the model (ontology) of the design process.…”

“…The notion of CVEs span a broad range of distributed systems-from text-based virtual environments (text based MOO/MUD and Web-based WOO environments [15]) to desktop virtual worlds (an example of such environments with different interfaces and information organisation is presented in Figure 1 and Figure 2) and immersive virtual worlds (for an excellent taxonomy of the latter see [5]). There are numerous approaches and techniques for designing such environments to support collaborative projects [14]. These approaches and techniques use different ways of formalising the requirements for the environment and the design of the project workspace.…”

“…• the concept of "media usage" which defines the feasible set of actions that can be performed in the collaborative virtual environment and the types of electronic media (file formats) that can be used and manipulated in the collaborative workspace [14]. The media usage defines to what extent the environment under consideration can be used for conducting collaborative projects in a particular domain.…”