Searching for patterns in how students perform collaborative design

Résumé En

In the research presented here, we work to discover patterns in a collaborative design task, performed synchronously and at a distance by three university students, using the collaborative platform DREW (drew.emse.fr), developed during the European project SCALE (IST 5 th framework). Our objectives are 1) to understand how participants carry out such design tasks 2) to form hypotheses about the role of resources and tools in learning or performing such tasks and 3) to test these hypotheses. Our final goal, in collaboration with industrial partners, is thus to propose ways of improving the design task either with new methods or tools that, by hypothesis, will facilitate designers' work, thus increasing efficiency and saving time and resources. We define patterns to be recurring sequences of activities and of interactions. In our contribution to the workshop, these concepts will be defined and our theoretical framework and methodological approach will be described. Results will illustrate examples of the patterns of activities and interactions found in the corpus and finally, we will explore the relation between the two types of patterns and discuss how this can help us meet our research objectives.