Individual and team contexts in a design

The paper discusses the role of context in a collaborative design process, with a Web-based environment for distributed architecture - engineering - construction teamwork. During this process, the decision is made collectively and progressively after a phase of negotiation among specialists from different domains. The goal of the project is to improve the teamwork performance by allowing participants (the specialists in different domains) to constitute a team and to collaborate in the project by interacting remotely in a virtual environment. The environment takes advantage of the current information technology to permit specialists to maintain their personal contexts and a shared team context, in which knowledge is acquired in concrete situations (i.e. knowledge is acquired in its context of use). The paper presents how context intervenes: (1) in the acquisition of the different types of knowledge as an intrinsic part of any negotiation, (2) how a decision making results of a progressive and negotiated building of a shared proceduralized context among the team participants, and (3) how participants in the teamwork can structure their own contextual knowledge (the individual contexts) and share, at least partially, their individual\´s tacit knowledge with other participants (in the team context). As a consequence, it emerges that design and learning are similar tasks, i.e. design is "learning by negotiating".