Distant Co-Design Among Professionals: A Proposal For Existing Activities Classification

International audienceThis study takes into account the industrial requirements and focuses on design activities conducted through information and communication technologies. The aim of the study is to describe activities taking place during distributed, synchronous co-design, and to specify favorable conditions for the development of collaborative practices in product engineering. A previous analysis of an existing situation involving the design of an automobile enabled the construction of a semi-controlled situation, simulating the co-design of an actual product. This situation required specific knowledge in mechanics and electronics skills utilized in their respective professions. Our observation focuses on three types of interactions in a distant distributed co-design computer-mediated task concerning specialized engineering students. The first concerns interactions between students, the second concerns student-tool interactions and the third concerns interactions between students and documents produced by the computer-mediated tools. The situation was filmed in order to construct an analysis grid. Through video analysis, this grid enabled us to link specific activities of co-conception with its tools and products. Recommendations for new or modified tool functions for the studied activity are made on the basis of our results, in particular for activity traces and annotations