USE OF COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGIES BY INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been used by designers for decades. Most commonly used ICT tools support individual users in their activities such as form creation, engineering analysis and production simulations. Besides individual support, with the advances in networking technology and Internet, ICT tools which support group design or distributed design processes have also emerged and they are on the market for almost two decades. These ICT tools are called “Collaboration Technologies”. There are different types of collaboration technologies. For instance, E-mail is the most widely known and used Collaboration Technology.

This research focuses on the use of collaboration technologies by industrial designers. The research attempts to find answers for the research questions such as “To what extent are industrial designers familiar with collaboration technologies?”, “Have they adapted collaboration technologies to their daily activities as it was expected by Collaboration Technology vendors?” and if not “What are the factors that disable them to use collaboration technologies effectively?”. The results of case studies conducted in academia and multinational design firms, interviews with several designers and an international online survey show that, in contrast to the expectations of Collaboration Technology vendors and managers who decide on ICT investment in design companies, there are still several technical and social factors which discourage industrial designers to adapt and use Collaboration Technologies in their daily design activities.