Sharing vs. Collaboration

Sharing is fundamental part of designing. It’s not design, without the intent to produce some sort of shared output.

There is a similar relationship between collaboration and design practice. If you treat design as a practice which includes the design of relationships with people, than you must engage in the act of collaboration at some time.

Collaborations are commonly formed for working on a project, followed by some type of shared output. The nature of shared output that comes as a result of collaboration requires different demands for sharing. These demands are even more varied when collaborations occur in an open-source environment.

This presents an area of opportunity to explore the affordances and create new tools surrounding collaboration.

At minimum there is need to modernize collaboration tools for designers.