Distributed collaboration for engineering design: A review and reappraisal

Collaborative manufacturing is aimed to increase the flexibility of design and production processes through multiple organizations pooling strengths o n a product-by-product basis to create distributed collaborative corporatio ns. These collaborations involve multidisciplinary, geographically disperse d teams of engineers who often communicate only through voice, video, or co mputer-mediated interfaces. Utilizing sociotechnical theory as a framework, this article reviews multip le sources of literature on collaboration and interprets them in light of t he collaborative engineering design process. A conceptual model of distribu ted engineering collaboration based on a sociotechnical theory framework is proposed to understand how technology changes both the social interaction and the technical design process. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.