The SHARE project emphasizes computer support of the collaborative distributed design process. How do engineers and designers collaborate, and what are the differences when they are geographically separated rather than in the same physical space? What are the mental processes to be supported? What human interface factors support collaboration and which inhibit it? How can the Internet be used to support such collaboration, both synchronously and asynchronously? What is the support of parts catalogs, consultation, and information about previous designs? Can individual design support systems cooperate to facilitate the human interaction? These are the kinds of questions SHARE seeks to answer.
These are also the kinds of questions all of the CDR projects are investigating. A good perspective is to imagine a future electronic design notebook that would be the entry point for a designer or engineer to access various Internet facilities. Such an exercise provides a good CDR project overview from a SHARE perspective.
In fact, all CDR projects fall within two major catagories that are required for the computational support of any future electronic design notebook that would be useful for collaborative design. We call the two categories Electronic Design Notebook Resources and Foundations.
Resources are largely Internet-based. They go beyond simple email contact with other design team members to include EIT collaborative tools such as X-Share, multiple methods of design document retrieval, general resource searching, rapid prototyping, and computational design agent coordination. This category of CDR projects can be placed in a matrix of functions versus interactions.
For an example of document retrieval, which falls in the category of a person-to-computer tool utility, see DEDAL.
CDR projects that are developing the science we need to support the use of electronic notebooks for design and engineering are called electronic design notebook Foundations.
It is important to note that these projects, particularly DEDAL, also contribute to the use of the notebook in that they have indexed documents that are available for retrieval today.
Several projects are investigating the best technology for interacting virtually with other designers and shared objects, ranging from documents to prototypes. The DaVinci project is investigating the physical requirements for designers to collaborate when they are co-located. Another example is DesignSpace, which is developing a virtual environment for collaborative and conceptual design with manual interaction. This environment presents an important alternative to the usual "virtual reality" approach.
The Synthesis Coalition is a collection of studies to revise how engineering and design is learned. The IBM Proprinter Case Study is one project within this coalition.
Another is the Engineering Intuition project, which is attempting to determine if there is a set of exercises that can be used to reliably develop engineering expertise in naive engineers. The successful results of this study will be a set of principles, underlying the exercises, that can be used for understanding what should be emphasized in the support of good design practice.
A unique feature of the SHARE project is that it is tied to a university course: ME-210, a project-intensive, industrial product design course spanning three academic quarters for beginning Stanford Masters students. ME210 functions as a testbed for the Internet tools developed in SHARE. This allows experimentation with a controlled set of engineers who have industrial experience and are working on industrial projects. In this way, SHARE can test the utility of the novel tools, developed for the most part at EIT, which also provides coaching and technical support to the students.
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Charles Petrie