UPHOLDING THE POETIC IN DESIGN COLLABORATION JANE R. BURRY, ANDREW L. BURROW, MARK C. BURRY Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001, Australia. jane.burry@rmit.edu.au; andrew.burrow@rmit.edu.au Abstract. Design is a fundamentally collaborative activity. It commonly calls on a wide range of expertise and is arguably most effective when all contributions can be considered from an early and highly conceptual phase of the process. The sharing of information, particularly in a process that, at its best, involves collective conceptualisation is complicated by the very close and reciprocal relationship between the partial knowledge about the object of design and the mode of expression or representation of these ideas. As the design process and its numerous inputs, iterations and interrelationships become embedded in the communications; knowledge capture, management and access become central issues. This paper will selectively recount some of the substantive evidence for the characteristics of communication environments most supportive to design collaboration. In response to these findings it will introduce the use of wiki as the basis of an environment to provide this support, provide more detailed examples of the ways in which wiki has been adopted in early collaborative experiments and describe the developments currently being implemented, and how these are being tested in use. 1. Introduction “very often, then, it is in the opposite of causality, that is, in reverberation, (…..) that I think we find the real measure of the being of a poetic image.”(Bachelard, 1964) This idea of striking a note that resonates in a very universal way, not wholly determined by the nature of the source, is very important to the reality of working together creatively to make something new. This sonorous quality is particularly important to preserve where the range of collaborating design participants from different disciplinary backgrounds spans the full gamut of traditional art, science and technology domains. Through participant observation of the design process in email archives, we have noted that one of the ways in which this occurs is through the invention of terms, often unexpected and metaphorical, that become the basis of a unique shared project language. In this way text is used as a medium for direct