"SketSha" or the sketch power to support collaborative design.

This paper presents a new supporting tool for distant collaborative design, named SketSha. This prototype supports the early stages of design and more particularly the initial and crucial step of free-hand sketching. SketSha and its particular interface, named the virtual desktop, aim to keep from Front-To-Front collaborative work all the benefits and to appoint to them some of the nowadays IT facilities, in order to manage in a realistic and efficient way a long distance collaboration and to effectively serve the designers’ needs. Our hope is to re-introduce the social aspects and group interactions, crucial for real system efficacy and adaptation to the business world. The paper presents the fundamental assumptions made to implement SketSha, that are questioned and analyzed through a real-size experimentation featuring 30 architecture and building engineering students, working together in real-time in different locations (Belgium and France). This experiment and the necessary survey open up interesting fields of investigations, such as the relevance of the sketch stage and the proposed device to support distant collaborative design in architecture and the benefit it represents for students, in a pedagogical point of view, to merge the IT aspects and the design studio. The methodology and the replicability are analyzed to increase the level and quality of our students’ formation and, finally, a critic of SketSha constitutes a benefit for the developing teams.