The big picture. (Collaborative Design).

One hallmark of collaborative design is the ability to share design information interactively and, ideally, synchronously. If multiple participants--design partners, or other stakeholders in the design process, such as customers, suppliers, manufacturing or marketing departments, and so forth--are to engage in a meaningful collaborative-design process, they must be able to share common, compatible views and navigational paths through representations of design data and have common or comparable abilities to query and annotate, if not actually edit and/or contribute to, the design. This is an intentionally broad and technologically agnostic definition of collaborative design.

Old Views

For example, members of a project team huddled over a set of blueline prints unfurled on a conference table are synchronously engaged in a common view of the drawing (a graphical representation of model-design data), with equal access to navigational paths (flipping to other sheets in the set) and to query/annotation tools (red pencils, yellow markers, sticky notes, and the like). Note that the only "technology" involved is stuff such as graphite and ammonia, but certainly nothing digital. This kind of face-to-face (f2f) collaborative-design process is familiar and well understood, but requires the physical presence of all participants in the same place at the same time. For small enterprises, or larger ones that are both vertically integrated and geographically centralized, f2f collaborative design remains viable. However, the structure of most manufacturing enterprises or construction businesses is neither conducive to nor tolerant of the trade-offs necessary to accommodate f2f as the …