Version control is critical in mechanical computer-aided design (CAD) to enable traceability, manage product variation, and support collaboration. Yet, its implementation in modern CAD software as an essential information infrastructure for product development remains plagued by issues due to the complexity and interdependence of design data. This paper presents a systematic review of user-reported challenges with version control in modern CAD tools. Analyzing 170 online forum threads, we identify recurring socio-technical issues that span the management, continuity, scope, and distribution of versions. Our findings inform a broader reflection on how version control should be designed and improved for CAD and motivate opportunities for tools and mechanisms that better support articulation work, facilitate cross-boundary collaboration, and operate with infrastructural reflexivity. This study offers actionable insights for CAD software providers and highlights opportunities for researchers to rethink version control.

Parametric computer-aided design (CAD) models are constructed by a sequence of operations, where each operation may reference geometries created by earlier operations. This network of dependencies enables efficient modelling of complex geometry but also results in fragile models, where small modifications can trigger cascading errors. These interdependencies are obscured in commercial CAD systems, leaving users to rely on trial and error when navigating, modularizing, and debugging unfamiliar and complex models. In this paper, we motivate, present, and pilot CADModelScope, a multi-level graph-based visualization of operation dependencies integrated into a commercial CAD platform. In a qualitative lab study, we observed how participants locate and interpret operations, and how CADModelScope enhances awareness of hidden interdependencies and supports more structured navigation. Our findings highlight the potential of using the network of operation dependency as an effective representation for understanding and interacting with parametric CAD models, and we discuss implications for future tool design.

In today's landscape, hardware development teams face increasing demands for better quality products, greater innovation, and shorter manufacturing lead times. Despite the need for more efficient and effective processes, hardware designers continue to struggle with a lack of awareness of design changes and other collaborators' actions, a persistent issue in decades of CSCW research. One significant and unaddressed challenge is understanding and managing dependencies between 3D CAD (computer-aided design) models, especially when products can contain thousands of interconnected components. In this two-phase formative study, we explore designers' pain points of CAD dependency management through a thematic analysis of 100 online forum discussions and semi-structured interviews with 10 designers. We identify nine key challenges related to the traceability, navigation, and consistency of CAD dependencies, that harm the effective coordination of hardware development teams. To address these challenges, we propose design goals and necessary features to enhance hardware designers' awareness and management of dependencies, ultimately with the goal of improving collaborative workflows.

While the unique challenges of hybrid work can compromise collaboration and team dynamics, hybrid teams can thrive with well-informed strategies and tools that nurture interpersonal engagements. To inform future supports, we pursue a mixed-methods study of hybrid engineering design capstone teams' Psychological Safety (PS) (i.e., their climate of interpersonal risk-taking and mutual respect) to understand how the construct manifests in teams engaged in innovation. Using interviews, we study six teams' perceptions of PS indicators and how they present differently on Slack (when compared to in-person interactions). We then leverage the interview insights to design Slack-based PS indicators. We present five broad facets of PS in hybrid teams, four perceived differences of PS on Slack compared to in-person, and 15 Slack-based, PS indicators--the groundwork for future automated PS measurement on instant-messaging platforms. These insights produce three design implications and illustrative design examples for ways instant-messaging platforms can support Psychologically Safe hybrid teams, and best practices for hybrid teams to support interpersonal risk-taking and build mutual respect.

Open-source is a decentralized and collaborative method of development that encourages open contribution from an extensive and undefined network of individuals. Although commonly associated with software development (OSS), the open-source model extends to hardware development, forming the basis of open-source hardware development (OSH). Compared to OSS, OSH is relatively nascent, lacking adequate tooling support from existing platforms and best practices for efficient collaboration. Taking a necessary step towards improving OSH collaboration, we conduct a detailed case study of DrawBot, a successful OSH project that remarkably fostered a long-term collaboration on Thingiverse - a platform not explicitly intended for complex collaborative design. Through analyzing comment threads and design changes over the course of the project, we found how collaboration occurred, the challenges faced, and how the DrawBot community managed to overcome these obstacles. Beyond offering a detailed account of collaboration practices and challenges, our work contributes best practices, design implications, and practical implications for OSH project maintainers, platform builders, and researchers, respectively. With these insights and our publicly available dataset, we aim to foster more effective and efficient collaborative design in OSH projects.

Branching is a feature of distributed version control systems that facilitates the "divide and conquer" strategy present in complex and collaborative work domains. Branching has revolutionized modern software development and has the potential to similarly transform hardware product development via CAD (computer-aided design). Yet, contrasting with its status in software, branching as a feature of commercial CAD systems is in its infancy, and little research exists to investigate its use in the digital design and development of physical products. To address this knowledge gap, in this paper, we mine and analyze 719 user-generated posts from online CAD forums to qualitatively study designers' intentions for and preliminary use of branching in CAD. Our work contributes a taxonomy of CAD branching use cases, an identification of deficiencies of existing branching capabilities in CAD, and a discussion of the untapped potential of CAD branching to support a new paradigm of collaborative mechanical design. The insights gained from this study may help CAD tool developers address design shortcomings in CAD branching tools and assist CAD practitioners by raising their awareness of CAD branching to improve design efficiency and collaborative workflows in hardware development teams.

Computer-aided design (CAD) has become indispensable to increasingly collaborative hardware design processes. Despite the long-standing and growing need for collaboration with CAD models and tools, anecdotal reports and ongoing researcher efforts point to a complex and unresolved set of challenges faced by designers when working with distributed CAD. We aim to close this academic-practitioner knowledge gap through the first systematic study of professional user-driven CAD collaboration challenges. In this work, we conduct semi-structured interviews with 20 CAD professionals of diverse industries, roles, and experience levels to understand their collaborative workflows with distributed CAD tools. In total, we identify 14 challenges related to collaborative design, communication, data management, and permissioning that are currently impeding effective collaboration in professional CAD teams. Our systematic classification of CAD collaboration challenges presents a guide for pressing areas of future work, highlighting important implications for CAD researchers, practitioners, and tool builders to target new advancement in CAD infrastructure, management choices, and modelling best practices. With the insights gained from this work, we hope to ultimately improve collaboration efficiency, quality, and innovation for future product design teams.

It was previously hypothesized that gender differences -- and thus gender discrimination -- would disappear if communication was no longer in person, and instead was transmitted and received in the same format for all. Yet, even online, researchers have identified gendered language styles in written communication that reveal gender cues and can lead to unequal treatment. In this work, we revisit these past findings and ask whether the same gendered patterns can be found on modern communication platforms, which present a new set of engagement features and mixed synchronous capabilities. We quantitatively analyze 335,000 Slack messages sent by 845 individuals as part of 46 teams, collected over six years of a product design capstone course. We found little evidence of traditionally gendered communication styles (characterized as elaborate, uncertain, and supportive) from the minority-gender participants. We did identify relationships between message author gender, communication style, and message engagement --- women and minority genders were more likely to have their messages engaged with, but only when using certain communication styles --- suggesting complex power dynamics exist on these platforms. We contribute the first study of gendered language styles on Enterprise Communication Platforms, adding to the community's understanding of how new settings and emerging technology relate to team collaborative dynamics, and motivating future tool development to support collaboration in diverse teams.

New developments to computer-aided design (CAD) software transform a once solitary modelling task into a collaborative one. The emerging multi-user CAD (MUCAD) systems allow virtual, real-time collaboration, with the potential to expand the learning outcomes and teaching methods of CAD. This paper proposes a MUCAD collaborative learning framework (MUCAD-CLF) to interpret backend analytic data from commercially available MUCAD software. The framework builds on several existing metrics from the literature and introduces newly developed methods to classify CAD actions collected from users’ analytic data. The framework contains two different classification approaches of user actions, categorizing actions by action type (e.g., creating, revising, viewing) and by design space (e.g., constructive, organizing), for comparative analysis. Next, the analytical framework is applied via a collaborative design challenge, corresponding to over 20,000 actions collected from 31 participants. Illustrative analyses utilizing the MUCAD-CLF are presented to demonstrate the resulting insight. Differences in CAD behaviour, indicating differences in learning, are observed between teams made up entirely of novices, entirely of experienced users, or a mix. In pairs of experts and novices, we see both a perceived high-satisfaction apprenticeship experience for the novices and preliminary evidence of an increase in expert design behaviours for the novices. The proposed framework is critical for MUCAD systems to make the most of the educational possibility of combining technical skill-building with team collaboration. Preliminary evidence collected in a fully-virtual design learning activity, and analyzed using the proposed MUCAD-CLF, shows that novice students gain advanced CAD design knowledge when collaborating with experienced teammates. With the user data captured by modern MUCAD software and the MUCAD-CLF presented herein, instructors and researchers can more efficiently assess and visualize students’ performance over the design learning process.

Today’s mechatronic systems are becoming more and more complex as the development and design processes require collaboration across multiple engineering disciplines. The high complexity between loosely connected models results in a disconnect between these inter-disciplinary models, which may cause delays and costly rework in the long run. There is a need for an effective method to show the dependencies and risks across models for various stakeholder groups. Currently, the discussion about such methods is limited. This paper proposes and evaluates a user-friendly Decision Graph and Matrix Visualization method that combines network-based and matrix-based techniques to assist stakeholders in tracking dependencies and risks across models. The method is applied and demonstrated with a design and engineering case of a lab-scale production system, whose usability was tested formatively with experts.