Asynchronous Architecture

... In the third row, the physical studio is again a single physical space, but the collaborators never actually meet. And finally, the fourth row, where the distributed asynchronous nature of the studio results in the collaborators always working in different locations at different times (Wojtowicz et al. 1993). Of course any of these modes of collaboration are rarely found in the idealized state represented in the diagram (Casaus et al. 1993). ...

... Together with synchronous applications and comprehensive systems, they form the first wave of collaborative design applications. In the early works, such asynchronous systems consisted of accounts on remote machines shared by several teams and individuals (Wojtowicz et al (1993)) using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), file naming conventions and email broadcasts to share the work. Later works introduced hypermedia databases referred to from shared Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and bulletin systems (Martens et al (1996)) and more structured repositories by e.g. ...

... Changes become immediately visible to others. Wojtowicz (1993) presented a classification for communication which was based on two simple observations: 1) either communication can take place between people who are in the same room or not (non-distributed versus distributed), and 2) communication can take place at the same time or not (synchronous versus asynchronous). Combined this gives four basic types of communication. ...

... The medium needs to address these creative and communicative roles of the designer. As the basic networks of communication emerged, several universities worldwide started to collaborate on Virtual Design Studios; the University of Hong Kong was one of the first to participate, joining the University of British Columbia, Harvard and MIT in the first Virtual Studio in 1993 (Wojtowicz et al., 1993). In these studios, students and tutors were able to share and collaborate in a new environment, engaging in tasks that had not been possible until this time. ...