In the Age of Collaboration, the Computer-Aided Design Ecosystem is Behind: An Interview Study of Distributed CAD Practice

Computer-aided design (CAD) has become indispensable to increasingly-collaborative hardware design processes. Despite the long-standing and growing need for collaboration with CAD models and tools, anecdotal reports and ongoing researcher efforts point to a complex and unresolved set of challenges faced by designers when working with distributed CAD. We aim to close this academic-practitioner knowledge gap through the first systematic study of professional user-driven CAD collaboration challenges. In this work, we conduct semi-structured interviews with 20 CAD professionals of diverse industries, roles and experience levels to understand their collaborative workflows with distributed CAD tools. In total, we identify 14 challenges related to collaborative design, communication, data management, and permissioning that are currently impeding effective collaboration in professional CAD teams. Our systematic classification of CAD collaboration challenges presents a guide for pressing areas of future work, highlighting important implications for CAD researchers, practitioners and tool builders to target new advancement in CAD infrastructure, management choices and modelling best practices. With the insights gained from this work, we hope to ultimately improve collaboration efficiency, quality and innovation for future product design teams.