Mobile and Pervasive Computing: The Future for Design Collaboration - Mobile and Pervasive Computing in Construction - page 184

and encourages designers to smoothly move between working on the same tasks
and working on different tasks or different aspects of the design.
The results from studies such as these provide important empirical evidence,
which should be applied as indicating factors and guidelines for future develop-
ment of collaborative technologies, including both mobile and pervasive comput-
ing technologies.
9.5.2 From collaborative design to collective design
With the widespread use of the internet for social networking in addition to
professional collaboration, now collaborative design can be significantly scaled up
from a predefined and preselected team of designers to crowdsourcing and
collective design. With the extensive use of the Internet, networks of international
and multidisciplinary practices are emerging to retool design practice to tackle
unconventional design problems (Hight and Perry, 2006). Powerful networking
and mobile technologies have enabled a larger scale participation in design, where
new devices such as smart phones and appliances combined with Mixed Reality
(MR) realized the seamless mobility as a personal media hub.
Collective intelligence in design can facilitate a more collectively-generated
design solution by motivating the broader community, designers and non-design
specialists, to participate in design thinking (Maher et al ., 2010). Maher et al . (2010)
extend the collaborative design framework for large-scale collective design by
adding another dimension, “motivation”, in addition to representation and
communication: requiring incentives and structures that motivate designers,
non-design specialists, and the general public to participate in collective design.
The large scale of participation could have the potential for a very large number of
contributions to the outputs that are qualitatively different from those of a carefully
constructed team of designers (McGonigal, 2008).
The fundamental mechanism for collective problem solving is that the envi-
ronment is used as a shared medium for storing information, so that it can be
accessible and interpreted by everyone, thus coordinating the actions of the
collective's users (Heylighen, 1999). Design culture is moving swiftly in the
direction of networked collaboration, where geographically distributed practices
have been reformulated by shifting isolated “intelligences” into “collectives” (Hight
and Perry, 2006). It is expected that scaling up to collective design would be the
basis of the directions for how collaborative technologies combined with social
computing could facilitate constructive participation in the development of design
environments. Mobile and pervasive computing could provide more opportunities
to designers, by giving them tools they can use to achieve collective intelligence in
an extended and networked environment system.
9.6 Conclusion
This chapter has traced the development of collaborative design technologies from
the early applications of CSCW through current developments in mobile and