Collaborative Design: Human Social Practices and Computer Capabilities

Developing complex systems requires collaboration among specialists in many disciplines who are often both geographically and organizationally distributed. Successful product development requires effective collaboration, but collaboration is difficult when people have different technical backgrounds or are separated by physical or organizational distance. Emerging collaboration technologies offer an array of tools that can help make collaboration more effective, but ensuring their effective use is another problem. Collaboration is a human social activity, and introducing new technologies in a social environment can have unintended side effects.