協同設計從九零年代發跡，截至目前已有十年左右的發展，可以算是一門顯學。協同設計相關的研究著作相當充沛，舉凡協同設計平台建置、協同環境建構與探討、協同績效與影響的要因、協同活動下的資訊溝通架構等等，皆已有相當的發展成果。不僅僅在學術界，在實務界中協同設計的應用與發展也有相當的成效，以台灣產業為例，實施協同設計的產業就跨及多種領域，包含IT系統（神達、華碩等）、光電產業（科橋、全台晶像等）、散熱零組件（建準、雙鴻等）、紡織（寶成工業、聚陽、佰龍機械、宏遠興業等）、機械電機（力山工業、上銀科技、福裕、三龍產業等）、工業設計（浩漢、世訊科技等）、車輛（光陽工業、三陽工業、巨大機械）、通訊（奇美通訊、正文科技、威寶電信）、模具（綠點高、雙葉開發等），此役可以展現出協同設計架構提出與探討的意義所在。然後在過往的研究中，主要的研究仍是針對特性領域進行，譬如多數協同設計的研究是針對協同過程之中，進行資訊交換與溝通平台的建立等較為技術性的文章，亦有不少論文是針對交換資訊的內容與知識討論，但是截至目前為止仍沒有較為統整概括出協同設計範圍與需要考量範圍的架構的文章，故本文主要是提出一種協同設計的分析開放架構，彙整實行協同設計時需要納入考量的主要因素，以利管理決策人員或是系統發展人員，在開發或指定相關決策時，有依循參考的準則。 Collaborative design (CD) is no more a new topic in these day and emerged around the 90s. Related researches have accomplished quite a view contribution so far to those aspects such as collaboration platform formation, CD environment construction, or even discussing about the communication mechanism across multiple-disciplines participants or protocols agents shared with each other. However, there is so little reference related to CD on the way to demonstrate how a CD project should proceed and when deciding in executing a CD activity, what are the crucial dimensions should decision-makers or system-developers should take into considerations. Therefore, we try to give a broad map or guidelines of CD in view of collecting different perspectives need to be considered when implementing design collaboration in this thesis. The CD cube framework provides people a general direction and main dimensions coping with CD. The framework directs people to make sure what aspects should they take into accounts, what stages are they try to participate in, and to what extent they want to collaborate with. The CD cube help managers to plan or analyze a CD project in a more complete and sound way for making plans or decisions under the organized and structured dimensions.
