The Distributed Design Studio

Design studios, now equipped with extensive computing facilities, are places where designers interact and discuss design projects, organise and structure the project data, transfer and share design representations, and develop and publish design documentation. In all of these activities, information can be handled in electronic form. Following the traditional office paradigm, large amounts of project data files (such as drawings, documents, spreadsheets, databases, manuals, forms, communications, schedules and discussions) move around the studio from one computer workplace to another, where they are processed on the individual “desktop”. The use of file server technology is usually reduced to the most rudimentary operations of moving files from one shared disk to another. Sometimes the same information is unnecessarily duplicated, sometimes important files remain either locked on the personal computer or lost somewhere on a barely navigable list of shared directories on a file server.