Collaborative design: Evolution of project’s information and role of the graphic interactions

Faced with challenges of new collaborative and digital design processes, it is necessary to understand how to support architectural design to articulate the information from the collaborative ideation (first creative moments of idea deployment) to the digital design phases that follow (such as BIM mo- dels specifications).
The study presented here lies within the fields of design theory and com- putational design as our research question is to analyze collaborative design processes to qualify the evolution of the information characterizing the pro- ject and the design activities generating this evolution, notably through the role of graphic interactions.
To achieve this goal, we changed the paradigm by considering the design- ers as transmitters of information, and the information as the heart of our questioning.
As result, we highlighted some typical design activities to characterize the project, recurrent associations of information and finally the importance of graphical traces as a support of this characterization.