Flexible support for group interactions in collaborative design, CSCWID98

Collaborative design systems support cross-functional teams in performing design work collaboratively. However, the sole use of social protocols to coordinate team members ’ activities may lead to potentially unexpected interactions and unpredictable conflicts when manipulating shared design artifacts. Therefore, there is a need to provide a computational mechanism to support group interactions in the shared workspace. This paper describes the functionality of SCOPE, a system that provides flexible support for group interaction in collaborative design. Our approach is to provide a mechanism to control the interaction of teams and to dynamically bind group interaction semantics to the properties of a collaborative design software system. Using this approach, group interaction can be controlled in a fine-grained and systematic manner and team members can adapt the system to changing circumstances during collaborative design