Design processes in a traditional design project mainly rely on the designer’s personal skills such as drawing, presentation and prototyping capability. However, in a collaborative design project the focus
is transferred from personal skills to design communication and knowledge management. Current advanced information and communication technology (ICT) dramatically changes the design process in terms of communication, information sharing and knowledge accumulation. This kind of design process deals with a huge amount of information and involves much more complicated interpersonal communication. Conceptual divergence among design team members usually starts from the initial design vision and mission. This paper presents a framework for managing communication-based
collaborative design projects that rely on close coordination. Through an interactive communication mechanism, designers perform creative thinking dependent on a variety of abilities and disciplines. A software interface design project is used as a case study to describe the proposed framework. In this case study the design team informs the customer of the design requirements and concepts via face-to-face communication (FTF) and computer-mediated communication (CMC). The management of information
flow and creative generation flow are integrated and design knowledge is accumulated during the design project. A communication-based collaborative design process is performed in the case study.