Introduction
The design industry exist in an environment that can be defined as being teamwork and multi-disciplinary. As such, collaboration among specialised expert to solve problems as a whole is essential. Each of the experts, such as an architect, engineer or planner collaborates for three reasons. Firstly no one individual or group has all the knowledge and resources to solve the whole problem independently; a problem termed by Simon (1969) as bounded rationality. Secondly, collaboration is vital in order to meet constraints such as time and money. Thirdly, the existence of many interdependencies in the execution of the decision making has made collaboration a necessity. Interdependence occurs when activities undertaken by agents are inter-related, and have an impact on the decisions of other agents. Moreover, the final solution will only be achieved through the process of negotiation and mutual adjustment.
One of the most fundamental issues when developing collaborative models
is how to ensure that experts act in a coherent manner. More importantly,
how should the experts behave, during the act of collaboration. Previous
theoretical models have not satisfactorily address these issue. These models
assume that all experts 'willingly' collaborate to solve a problem, and
that all collaboration will be successful. How do we for example, ensure
that all individual experts are committed to execute the collaborative
act? What happen for example, if something goes wrong such as, if collaboration
is not successful? How should the experts react when one of its team
members decided to pullout of the collaborative action, halfway into the
process? Finally, how should an expert react, when after making a commitment
to collaborate, finds that it needs more time to solve the problem because
of unforeseen circumstances beyond its control.