Design Communication in Industry: A Survey Analysis

Design processes are changed by the progression of globalization. Consequences are, among other things, that more and more design teams are not located at one spot anymore, but work locally distributed. The performance of distributed working design teams compared to collocated working teams is observed as less efficient. One possible reason for this is that communication in distributed working teams is less effective than in collocated teams. However especially in distributed teams communication, as well as sharing and management of information, is necessary to maintain the collaboration. Thus, communication media play an important role when investigating distributed design. Our objective, concerning distributed teams, is to find out, which communication media enterprises are using now and what kind of communication media are desired by designers in practice. To achieve this, a survey among engineers from industry was carried out. The survey is part of the DFG funded Project: “Integrierter Kommunikationsraum fur die verteilte Produktentwicklung”