Studying design behaviour in collaborative virtual environments

Developing and including new collaborative virtual environments in the design process needs an understanding of their impact on the collaborative process and on the focus of a design meeting. The study reported in this paper compares two types of remote collaboration environments with face to face sketching. The two remote environments are remote sketching and a 3D virtual world. The experimental study involves collecting data while pairs of architects work on a prescribed design task. The collected data includes video, verbal protocol data, and screen images. The analysis of the data highlights the differences in the collaborative process, communication content and the representation of the design solution. Our preliminary results show that the remote sketching encourages a broader exploration of design ideas and the 3D virtual world encourages collaborative modelling of design solutions for improved visual evaluation.