In the Age of Collaboration, the Computer-Aided Design Ecosystem is Behind: An Interview Study of Distributed CAD Practice

Abstract

Computer-aided design (CAD) has become indispensable to increasingly collaborative hardware design processes. Despite the long-standing and growing need for collaboration with CAD models and tools, anecdotal reports and ongoing researcher efforts point to a complex and unresolved set of challenges faced by designers when working with distributed CAD. We aim to close this academic-practitioner knowledge gap through the first systematic study of professional user-driven CAD collaboration challenges. In this work, we conduct semi-structured interviews with 20 CAD professionals of diverse industries, roles, and experience levels to understand their collaborative workflows with distributed CAD tools. In total, we identify 14 challenges related to collaborative design, communication, data management, and permissioning that are currently impeding effective collaboration in professional CAD teams. Our systematic classification of CAD collaboration challenges presents a guide for pressing areas of future work, highlighting important implications for CAD researchers, practitioners, and tool builders to target new advancement in CAD infrastructure, management choices, and modelling best practices. With the insights gained from this work, we hope to ultimately improve collaboration efficiency, quality, and innovation for future product design teams.

Analysis of collaborative CAD user actions in design sprint: insights from an educational setting

“…Examining CAD activities has been gaining considerable research attention, especially after the transformation of CAD systems from standalone to collaborative, transitioning from local computers to cloud-based, synchronous systems accessible from any web browser. This focus is driven by its ability to address common CAD collaboration challenges such as synchronous editing limitations, seamless file-sharing issues, and the visibility of design changes (Cheng et al, 2023). In addition to Sadeghi et al's (2016) suggestion that capturing design process information could help to better understand the design process and its challenges to improve designer productivity, collaborative CAD can provide a suitable platform for a non-intrusive collection of data on user action.…”