Applying distributed cognition to cooperative design

Cooperative design is one of the most important subjects of the researches on CSCW. Distributed cognition is a useful theoretical framework applied to analyzing, designing, implementing, and evaluating cooperative design systems. In this paper, we construct a detailed distributed cognition framework, explain these terms in it, and implement a prototype of the cooperative design system, smart cooperative design system (SCDS), based on the framework. In SCDS, the computer can infer not only local participant intent but also team intent by capturing information distributed external environment and individual historical interactions. Cooperative participants can learn the intent each other through information representation distributed over individuals and artifacts. In some extent, this avoids some collaborative conflict.