The impacts of digital design platforms on design cognition during remote collaboration: A systematic review of protocol studies

For over a decade, technology has been available to support design teams to operate in diverse physical locations and time zones. Despite this, until relatively recently designers have largely continued to work in physically co-located teams. This has all, however, changed in the last year, with designers in many countries being forced to work remotely. The problem addressed in this article is the lack of synthesised knowledge about the impacts of digital modalities on designers' cognitive operations when they are working in distributed teams. With an emphasis on synthesis of existing knowledge, this article conducts a systematic review of research in accordance with the PRISMA framework. The systematic review identifies ten studies that have a common concern (design cognition), a common method (protocol analysis) and a common setting (collaborative yet remote interactions). This article analyses the past research, developing a collective model of cognitive operations in remote design collaboration and synthesising the findings about the impacts of technology (the platforms supporting remote collaboration) on cognition. Through this process multiple gaps in the body of knowledge are also identified, several weaknesses are uncovered and advice for future researchers is developed.