Supporting mutual understanding in collaborative design project

In collaborative design, participants usually have different backgrounds and standpoints. Due to these differences, it is hard for participants to mutually understand intentions, and they must make a lot of effort to reach a mutual agreement on the design. Thus, the efficiency of the design processes is decreased. We propose a framework to support participants in mutual understanding by grasping and showing the differences among their intentions in a collaboration. A system based on the proposed framework has the following characteristics: it facilitates mutual understanding among participants by presuming their intentions and by communicating them in an understandable form, it visualizes the differences in concepts among the participants, and it progresses the collaboration in an interactive way.