We discuss a vision of and work in progress on a collaborative engineering environment, the Collaborative Design Studio, being developed at the Geometric and Intelligent Computing Laboratory at Drexel University. This works seeks to integrate Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and communication tools through automatic extraction and embedding of design context into communications, as well as provide archiving and retrieval of informal communications. While preliminary development of the studio has proceeded using relatively informal input from professional design engineers, direct evaluation by intended users of the system will be sought to guide further development of the system to ensure that it accurately meets their needs and fits into their work environment. Such formative user input will be obtained through surveys and observation of subjects as they complete specified tasks. Future summative evaluation will attempt to measure changes in user productivity and efficiency. Discussion foc...
Jonathan Sevy, Vera Zaychik, Thomas T. Hewett, Wil