Enabling efficient collaboration in digital design spaces across time and distance
As the Design Thinking Method is becoming increasingly popular and widespread worldwide, Design Thinkers expand their collaborations across regions and continents and are thus geographically dispersed, even across time zones. The visual and haptic components of the work space are so far hard to share over distance and time. Moreover, written documentation and communication work tend to suppress creativity, curiosity, spontaneity, and team experience. D-Tools 2.0 aims at designing and implementing new IT-tools, which really support and optimize collaborative Design Thinking without hindering the team performance during the process. 
In the first phase we focused on supporting real-time Design Thinking for teams distributed over different locations. We developed the “tele-Board” prototype which clearly shows the potential of remote Design Thinking by digital means shown in the prototype video. Through observations and user feedback we discovered that the digital support of Design Thinking activities is not only useful for synchronous and distributed work settings but also valuable for both co-located and distributed asynchronous work. For synchronous setups, we will further investigate how to support the synthesis phase with digital tools as this phase is crucial for all design processes.
Within the scope of the D-Tools 2.0 project we attempt to answer the following research questions that include, but are not limited to:
- Is it possible to work efficiently in a geographically distributed design thinking team?
- What is the value of navigating through a project history and linked information artifacts, and how can we make most use of it?
- To what extent can the daily handover process of distributed Design Thinking teams - working asynchronously - be improved by identifying critical periods in the project’s timeline?
- How can digital tools support the synthesis phase of a co-located team, and make it even possible in a distributed setting?