The Acts of Cooperative Design

An essential prerequisite to successful cooperative design is communication among designers in the design task concerned. Lin guistics may support the communication process by providing procedures for the analysis of verbal communication, whether spoken or written, and hence, immediately suggests itself as a source of descriptive methods that may fruitfully be employed in the study of communication in coop erative design. However, linguistics concepts can also be applied in other ways to cooperative design technology, notably in relation to the design of knowledge-based systems (agents). It is within this context that this paper presents a communication scheme called CASCADE (Communicative Acts in Cooperative Architectural Design Environments) which supports the interaction between agents. It commences by outlining a multi-agents framework and discusses the communication scheme and its implementation.