Design Tools for Supporting the Remote Collaborative Design Process: A Systematic Review

As design collaboration shifts from co-located to remote, both human-computer interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) have been seeking ways to support distributed collaborative design processes. We noticed that a lot of studies focused on the early phase co-ideation process, i.e., brainstorming and sketching, while the later phase co-exploration through iterative prototyping remains relatively unexplored. Therefore, improving the remote collaborative design process remains a research challenge. This literature review elaborates on the current supporting tools and their corresponding strategies during different design practices. We contribute an overview of the design space for improving the remote collaborative design processes. Moreover, we identified gaps and opportunities for future research and tool development in the remote collaborative design process. We end this paper by concluding the insights with a research agenda for our future research.