Group-to-Group Distance Collaboration:

this paper, we report on distributed group-to-group collaboration in the domain of space mission design. The nature of the task---conceptual space mission design---is highly complex. Design has been characterized as an illdefined problem (e.g. Carroll 2000). As a result, it requires much negotiation and articulation as design tradeoffs are discussed. Collocated environments are advantageous for designers not only because they provide awareness of the state of the design (Robertson, 1997) but they also enable designers to have immediate access to others, e.g. to question the relevancy of a requirement, to negotiate design tradeoffs, to collectively "walk through" the design and discuss discrepancies. A distributed environment makes these activities more difficult. Furthermore, in an arena with multiple teams and sites, the difficulty of accessing another designer is even more compounde