Influences of integrating touch screen smart board and CAD in collaborative design

Although a digital design tool like CAD has a strong influence on creative design, it is merely used in the detail design stage to present the visualized final product in 3D space. Limitations in CAD have led to the great emphasis on employing supporting tools in early stages of conceptual design. This paper aims to comprehend the need for supporting tools with CAD package in the design process. To understand the role played by a supporting tool in collaborative design, six laboratory experiments involving six pairs of designers working on three different design problems were conducted in the original and redesign phases. Designers were provided with Rhinoceros® CAD design tool and a SMART Board™ Interactive Whiteboard with SMART Notebook™ software as supporting tools. A significant finding from the video protocols and captured documents analyses is that there is a strong negative correlation between frequency of transactions between these two tools and the quality of final designs generated