Creative Collaboration: A Case Study of the Role of Computers in Supporting Representational and Relational Interaction in Student Engineering Design Teams

In this paper, the authors present a framework for examining the role of computers in supporting creative collaborative engineering design. It is argued that the affordance of computational technology for supporting both representational and relational aspects of design is essential for creative collaboration. Representational aspects refer to the creation of verbal descriptions or visual sketches necessary for the generation and sharing of ideas. Relational aspects refer to support for communicative and collaborative aspects that are the cornerstones of teamwork. To illustrate the usefulness of the proposed framework, the authors present empirical findings from a case study of a collaborative engineering design project. In this study, a team of engineering design students successfully appropriate available technologies to create collaborative practices. The design practices of this team are compared with another team working on the same project but that met face-to-face. Through this comparison it is shown that computation technology can be used creatively by design teams.