Cognitive, social, and environmental attributes of distributed engineeringcollaboration: A review and proposed model of collaboration

The objective of this article is to review the attributes that influence di stributed collaboration groups engaged in engineering tasks in order to gui de the research into the development of new tools and methods to support en gineering groups. Three comprehensive areas of literature that describe the cognitive, social, and environmental factors influencing collaboration are covered including task characteristics, collaborative technology, and grou p/individual development. A model is proposed that can contribute to the un derstanding of the engineering collaboration process, distributed group int eraction, and the role of the task within this environment. The relationshi ps between the attributes included in the model are hypothesized to affect the distributed collaboration process. This article discusses the attribute s and suggests that further research is required to validate the model's re lationships. (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.