Design communication: issues confronting both co-located and virtual teams

Today's design activities are usually conducted in teams of professionals who represent different design domains, e.g. architects and engineers. Within these teams clear and accurate communication of design and technical concepts and information is critical. A current trend is for the conduct and management of these teams to move towards working more in virtual environments. The use of high bandwidth Information and Communication Technologies (ICT's) is increasing and with this increase is the need to better understand those generic skills, such as communication, which contribute to the successful application of the ICT hardware and software. Communication skills have been identified as an important factor which may be affected in the transition from co-located team collaboration to the virtual environment. These issues usually manifest themselves in the ability of team members to use both visual and verbal forms of communication concurrently. Also of significance is the importance of "cues" in communication interactions during collaboration, this resulting in less effective achievement of shared understanding among team members. This paper reports on industry based research of both co-located and virtual teams involved in the activity of designing. It concentrates on the communication between team members. The results of this research identify a range of communication issues which confront these teams in their design activities which will inform, in association with other factors being researched, which are outside the scope of this paper, the development of skills auditing and mapping tools.