This paper proposes a new approach to collaboratively designing original products and crafted objects in a distributed virtual environment. Special attention is paid to concept formulation and image substantiation in the early design stage. A data management strategy and its implementation method are shown to effectively share and visualize a series of shape-forming and modeling operations performed by experts on a network. A 3D object representation technique is devised to manage frequently updated geometrical information by exchanging only a small amount of data among participating systems. Additionally, we contrive a method for offloading some expensive functions usually performed on a server such as multi-resolution data management and adaptive data transmission control. Client systems are delegated to execute these functions and achieve "interactivity vs. image quality" tradeoffs based on available resources and operations in a flexible and parallel fashion.