Interpretive Alignment in Asynchronous Collaborative Design: Toward a Cognitive Mediator for Early-Stage Design Work

In the early stage of collaborative architectural design, designers often move back and forth between individual exploration and team discussion, gradually developing and adjusting the design direction along the way. As the design moves from divergence toward convergence, design intent is continually retained, compressed, changed, or even misunderstood through repeated expression, representation, and communication. This thesis looks at how these changes affect the team’s understanding of the design problem and their later design development. To study this, I developed a probe-based system that records verbal expression, visual representation, and design actions during conceptual design, and aligns these process traces for analysis. Through an experimental task that includes individual ideation, collaborative discussion, and later design development, this thesis examines how design intent is externalized at different stages, and how it is later understood, carried forward, or shifted by others. The goal is to better understand how design intent is transmitted in collaborative architectural conceptual design, and to provide a basis for future systems that support design reflection and collaborative communication.