Supporting group awareness in collaborative design

Different from multi-user database management systems, CSCW systems must support group awareness explicitly, namely that participants should perceive the presence of each other during the process of cooperation, which is essential to effective collaboration. The authors firstly analyze and compare several means of supporting sensibility, then investigate the model of collaborative design and suggest achieving group awareness by product data which forms the foundation of a relationship among designers. The information model and the shared workspace organization of CECAD (Collaborative Environment for Computer-Aided Design, a prototype system developed by the authors) are presented and its group awareness supporting mechanism is described in succession.