Abstract
Collaborative product design implies that multiple designers will cooperate during the design of a product, by sharing knowledge and information. For practical design teams, expertise in a wide area is needed, but the area that a single designer can proficiently handle is usually quite narrow. Therefore, facilitated collaboration is indispensable to achieve efficient results from a practical design team. In recent years, customer requirements have become increasingly diversified, and companies have focused upon developing unique or increasingly sophisticated products to maintain their market share. As a result, achieving especially creative designs has become more important than ever. An additional aim of collaboration is to maximally assist this type of creative design process. This paper discusses an advanced collaborative system supporting creative design processes that depend on interactive communication among a number of designers. To implement such a system, this paper proposes several methods : a collaborative communication procedure that enables designers to create new ideas more effectively, an analytical technique for uncovering "seed" ideas that may become important as the design project evolves, and the necessary support system to apply these techniques to practical designs.
