Communication Media in Distributed Collaboration – Analysis in Design Experiments

Increasing globalization affects design processes, as e.g. in global companies more and more design teams are working locally distributed. Since face to face meetings are usually time and cost consuming, members of distributed teams are at least partially obliged to communicate via electronic media. The communication in these teams has been observed less efficient compared to collocated teams. Ruiz-Dominguez states that communication media in distributed teams slow down cognitive synchronization and shared understanding. On the one hand the usage of electronic communication media in non collocated teams bears problems, on the other hand the communication in these teams is important for the success. That leads to the conclusion that the communication media and the use of these media should be paid attention to. The objective of the experiments that are presented in this paper is to get a deeper understanding of the role of communication media in distributed design teams. The experiments were designed to look at the question: “Which communication media are used in what combination depending on the design process?” A minor question was: “Can the application of desktop virtual reality improve the communication?” This paper covers the setup of the experiments, the capture and analysis of the data and the presentation and discussion of the results.     «

Increasing globalization affects design processes, as e.g. in global companies more and more design teams are working locally distributed. Since face to face meetings are usually time and cost consuming, members of distributed teams are at least partially obliged to communicate via electronic media. The communication in these teams has been observed less efficient compared to collocated teams. Ruiz-Dominguez states that communication media in distributed teams slow down cognitive synchronization...     »