A Multi-User Design Workspace

Advances in digital media and digital communication has fostered the growth of a new enabling technology that allows geographically displaced individuals to hold group meetings and provides the opportunity to interact in a collaborative venture. The development of computer software to aid remote collaboration has, until recently, focused on the provision of tools that enable two or more people to participate in the shared authoring of a mixed-media (lexi-visual) documents. This paper presents a model of the design process which is founded on the transient nature of collaboration. The model is used to develop a multimedia framework to support remote collaborative design providing transitional support between synchronous and asynchronous design activity. A prototype system is used to illustrate the salient features of the framework