There is much upon which the CAAD community can congratulate itself; each year the proceedings of E C A A D E, A C A D I A, C A A D Futures and now C A A D R I A expose an increasingly rich diversity of applications of the information technologies to architectural education. The purpose of this paper, however, is to highlight the relative paucity of applications which lie at the very centre of design education - i.e. the "cause and effect" of how design decisions impact upon the quality of the building.

With the recent introduction of computer graphics, much attention has been given to the representation of architecture. Floor plans and elevations have remained relatively unchanged, while digital animation and photorealistic renderings have become exciting new means of representation. A problem with the majority of this work and especially photorealistic rendering is that it represents the building as a image and concentrates on how a building looks as opposed to how it works. Often times this "look" is artificial, expressing the incapacity of programs (or their users) to represent the complexities of materials, lighting, and perspective. By using digital representation in a descriptive, less realistic way, one can explore the rich complexities and interrelationships of architecture. Instead of representing architecture as a finished product, it is possible to represent the ideas and concepts of the project.

Pairs of participants were set a design problem and asked to solve it in face-to-face settings. The same problem was then tackled by participants in settings using two different modes of computer-supported communication: email and an electronic whiteboard. Protocols were collected and analyzed in terms of the constraints of each tool relative to the task and to each other. The GOMS methodology was used as a way to represent the collaborative design process in a way that yields information on both the productivity and performance of participants in each of the three experimental conditions. It also yielded information on the component elements of the design process, the basic cognitive building-blocks of design, thereby suggesting fundamentally new tools that might be created for interaction in virtual environments.

A further goal of the study was to explore the nature of task differences in relation to alternative platforms for communication. It was hypothesized that design processes involving significant negotiation would be less aided by computer support than straight forward design problems. The latter involve cooperative knowledge application by both participants and are therefore facilitated by information-rich forms of computer support. The former, on the other hand, requires conflict resolution and is inhibited by non face-to-face interaction. The results of this study point to the fact that the success of collaboration in virtual space is not just dependent on the nature of the tools but also on the specific nature of the collaborative task.