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 on a product-by-product basis to create distributed collaborative corporations. These collaborations involve multidisciplinary, geographically dispersed teams of engineers who often communicate only through voice, video, or computer-mediated interfaces. Utilizing sociotechnical theory as a framework, this article reviews multiple sources of literature on collaboration and interprets them in light of the collaborative engineering design process. A conceptual model of distributed engineering collaboration based on a sociotechnical theory framework is proposed to understand how technology changes both the social interaction and the technical design process.