Flexible support for group interactions in collaborative design Yongwu Miao and Jörg M. Haake GMD - German National Research Center for Information Technology IPSI - Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute Dolivostrasse 15, D-64293 Darmstadt, Germany Email: {miao, haake}@darmstadt.gmd.de Abstract Collaborative design systems support cross- functional teams in performing design work collaboratively. However, the sole use of social protocols to coordinate team members’ activities may lead to potentially unexpected interactions and unpredictable conflicts when manipulating shared design artifacts. Therefore, there is a need to provide a computational mechanism to support group interactions in the shared workspace. This paper describes the functionality of SCOPE, a system that provides flexible support for group interaction in collaborative design. Our approach is to provide a mechanism to control the interaction of teams and to dynamically bind group interaction semantics to the properties of a collaborative design software system. Using this approach, group interaction can be controlled in a fine-grained and systematic manner and team members can adapt the system to changing circumstances during collaborative design. Keywords Collaborative design, Collaboration protocols, SCOPE, Group interaction, CSCW 1 Introduction Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a way to speed up product development by integrating downstream concerns as early as possible in the design process and to promote cooperative work of all disciplines and domain experts within cross-functional teams. CE emphasizes both a simultaneous execution of shared tasks and the control of cooperative decision making by cross-functional teams. Therefore, it is important to understand the need for interaction and communication within and between cross-functional teams of individuals who may be scattered over a wide geographic range. In this paper we focus on provision of flexible support for group interaction within a cross-functional team. In order to support collaborative design in cross- functional teams, most of the existing collaborative design support systems provide desk top audio and video connections and a shared workspace which contains all the shared artifacts used by the team. The shared artifacts are managed and manipulated by all members of the team. Group communication and interaction is performed by using audio and video facilities and by manipulating shared artifacts. However, such systems provide less support for users to organize, coordinate, and control collaborative activities in order to achieve a goal in an organizational context. Team members have to use social protocols to coordinate their activities. Although coordination of interaction is most flexible with vocal agreements, prevention of violations is impossible. That is, potentially unexpected interactions and unpredictable conflicts may occur during manipulating shared artifacts. Therefore, there is a need to provide a computational mechanism to support group interactions in the shared workspace. Such a computational mechanism should be conceived as an abstract device incorporated in domain-specific software applications [7]. Presently, most mechanisms to control the interaction within a cross-functional team are provided either at the data level (e.g., access control) or at the process level (e.g., workflow). However, in some situations, a mechanism provided at only one level is not sufficient to control group interaction [3]. Based on such mechanisms, a coordination policy can be established as a computational definition of group interaction, which is incorporated in the design support software. It will govern actual group interactions in collaborative design processes so as to avoid conflict situations. Coordination policies can be selected and implemented in the program development phase. Thus, users have to follow the built-in coordination policy to interact with each other. However, design is a creative task and collaborative design processes are ill-structured and often long-lived. Such processes vary from project to project and even within the same project at different stages [2]. Therefore, a more dynamic technique is needed for collaborative design systems to adapt to changing circumstances during collaborative design. This paper describes the functionality of a system which provides flexible support for group interaction in collaborative design. Our approach is to provide a mechanism to control the interaction in teams by combining the data level control mechanisms and the process level control mechanisms, and to bind group interaction semantics to the properties of a collaborative design software system dynamically. The facilities described in this paper have been implemented in the SCOPE ("Session-based