A socio-technical approach to support collaborative engineering design.

摘要

Engineering design is essentially a technical activity to fulfill human purposes. Collaborative design is conducted by a group of people with different purposes, circumstances, and expertise. When stakeholders join the group and “co-construct” the design campaign, the collaborative design activity becomes a Socio-Technical process. Traditional design theories and methodologies ignore the social aspects of collaborative design. They assume that stakeholders' perspectives are relatively uniform and static during the design processes. However, in practice, the perspectives of stakeholders are adaptive to the design situations and evolve during their interactions with each other. This research developed a comprehensive approach to clarify the relationships among various technical and social factors in collaborative design. Furthermore, to successfully support collaborative design, it provides a methodology to facilitate design perspective reconciliation and conflict management during the design process.; After the investigation of the fundamental characteristics of collaborative design, three critical issues are identified. They are design process, design conflict, and stakeholders' perspectives. This research develops systematic methods to support design stakeholders' interaction by analyzing the relationships among these issues. These methods build a new framework to represent, analyze, and control the design process, and to manage design conflicts. It takes the socio-technical standpoint toward collaborative design, which mainly considers the perspective differences among the stakeholders rather than only focusing on the data inconsistencies. The methodology provides three key functions: to identify the deficiencies of design process, to manage the conflict, and to improve the perspective reconciliation among the organization. This methodology eventually realizes a feedback control mechanism to manipulate the three critical issues in design, while most of the exiting approaches view it as an open loop system. It also provides guidelines to implement web-based information systems to support collaborative design.