A method to investigate design cognition in virtual environments

High-bandwidth communication and leading-edge design technologies offer promising innovations to the Architecture Engineering Construction industry. Because, these advance technologies reduce the reliance on co-presence and address the challenges of being in distant locations. Although there is a variety of research on collaborative design that examines the way in which designers work and collaborate, it is also not clear that whether the perceiving and acting in the 3D virtual worlds would provide better designing and collaboration experiences through the augmentation of spatial cognition. The paper commences with a comprehensive analysis of a wide variety of newly emerging technologies supporting collaborative design and different modes of design representation. Then the paper presents a methodology of a future study to investigate human cognition in different high-bandwidth collaborative environments. The outcomes will lead to a more critical understanding of how collaborative design can be facilitated, more particularly, how designer collaborate and interact with the external design representations using leading-edge design technologies.