An approach to assess the quality of collaboration in technology-mediated design situations

Our objective is to measure and compare the quality of collaboration in technology-mediated design activities. Our position is to consider collaboration as multidimensional. We present a method to assess quality of collaboration which is composed of seven dimensions concerning communication processes such as grounding, coordination processes, task-related processes, symmetry of individual contributions as well as motivational processes. This method is used in a study aiming to compare the quality of collaboration in architectural design. In this experimental study, design situations vary according to technology-mediation - co-presence with an augmented reality (AR) environment versus distance with AR and visio-conferencing -, and according to number of participants - pairs versus groups of four architects -. Our results show that distinctive dimensions of collaboration are affected by the technology mediation and/or the number of co-designers. We discuss these results with respect to technology affordances such as visibility and group factors.