All’s not Fair in CAD: An Investigation of Equity of Contributions to Collaborative Cloud-based Design Projects

Abstract

Cloud-based Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools are changing the way design happens in industrial and educational settings. These tools enable a streamlined collaborative process, unlocking the potential for technical and teamwork integrated teaching and learning. Further, cloud-based CAD can enable distant teamwork in which information and ideas are shared in real time among team members and between students and instructors. In team projects, it is important not only to fairly assess the outcomes, but also to reduce the likelihood of unequal contributions among team members. In this paper, we re-examine a cloud-CAD data set from a team design exercise to describe how the analytics from CAD tool Onshape can deliver a metric of team member contribution by expanding on a published analytics framework, namely the Multi-User CAD – Collaborative Learning Framework (MUCAD-CLF). We identify a trend of individual dominance, where one team member does a majority of the CAD work, and we then analyze the CAD actions that this dominant individual takes, looking for gatekeeping behaviour. We discuss implications of this solo-dominance phenomenon and propose future work towards improved contribution equity on collaborative CAD teams.