The development and evaluation of a framework for collaborative design around an interactive tabletop

Design can be viewed as an activity in which teams of designers work together towards a final solution. As designers collaborate, there is a need to share, coordinate, and annotate various design media. In addition, when a collaborative design project involves both individual and collaborative activities, it is an imperative that the transition between these two types of activity is adequately supported. The designers need to be able to re-establish a common understanding of the state of the project after each individual separately made changes to parts of the design. A collaborative tool such as the interactive tabletop may provide new approach for designers to share these important aspects of their design thinking in a co-located environment. In this research, an evaluation on the usability of an interactive tabletop in a co-located collaborative design task was conducted.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo