Abstract

Abstract. In the contemporary world, engineers and designers face huge challenges as they shift towards novel organizational concepts such as ‘concurrent engineering ’ in order to manage increasing product diversity so as to satisfy customer demands while trying to accelerate the design process to deal with the competitive realities of a global market and decreasing product life cycles. In this environment, the coordination and integration of the myriads of interdependent and yet distributed and concurrent design activities becomes enormously complex. It thus seems as if CSCW technologies may be indispensable if concurrent engineering is to succeed. On the basis of ethnographic studies of cooperative design, the paper attempts to characterize cooperative work in the domain of design and to outline a set of crucial research problems to be addressed if CSCW is to help engineers and designers meet the challenges they are facing. On one hand, designers need highly flexible ‘coordination mechanisms ’ that can support horizontal coordination of large-scale distributed design projects, and on the other hand design organizations require versatile and ubiquitous infrastructures to be able to manage their ‘common information spaces ’ without sacrificing the critical adaptivity and concurrency. In order to be able to conceptualize and specify the support requirements of cooperative design, it is useful to make an analytical distinction between ‘cooperative work ’ and ‘articulation work. ’ According to this conception, cooperative work is constituted by the interdependence of multiple actors who, in their individual activities, in changing the state of their individual field of work, also change the state of the field of work of others and who thus interact through changing the state of a common field of work. However, since it involves multiple actors, cooperative work is inherently distributed, not only in the usual sense that activities are distributed in time and space, but also — and more importantly — in the sense that actors are semi-autonomous in terms of the different circumstances they are faced with in their work as well as in terms of their strategies, heuristics,

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