Net-enabled Collective Design Authorship

The paper describes an experiment in collective design authorship conducted within a semester-long virtual design studio. Students at two geographically distant institutions were asked to design a "Place2Meet on the Water," a small floating pavilion to be assembled from hollow-section steel components. The first part of the studio was devoted to a study of precedents, done in teams of five students from both institutions, who worked both synchronously and asynchronously over the Internet. The students' work was continuously reviewed through virtual crits conducted using web pages and video conferencing. The second part of the virtual design studio, devoted to the actual design of the pavilion, was divided into five closely related phases. After each phase students had to place their designs into a common database. They then had to browse through submitted designs and choose one to develop further; they were not allowed to continue with their own designs. That way, students implicitly formed teams and engaged in collective design authorship that was enabled by the network and supported by the design database. The design-centered research project presented in this paper also examines the issues of teaching methods and whether the quality of design could be improved in a networked design environment based on collective authorship and how such an environment can affect the nature of the produced designs.