It's a Complete Haystack: Understanding Dependency Management Needs in Computer-Aided Design

2025-08-07

AI Summary

In hardware development, 3D CAD models exhibit highly complex dependency structures—often comprising thousands of components—leading to significant challenges in impact analysis, cross-role collaboration, and synchronization. This complexity exposes nine critical issues spanning traceability, navigability, and consistency. To address this gap, we conducted a thematic analysis of 100 online forum discussions and semi-structured interviews with 10 senior hardware designers, systematically identifying and categorizing these pain points for the first time. Building on these findings, we propose the “dependency-aware collaboration” design paradigm and introduce a corresponding framework featuring dependency visualization, change-propagation alerts, and contextual synchronization for collaborative editing, guided by six design principles. Our work fills a theoretical void in CSCW research on hardware co-design and provides empirically grounded, actionable guidelines for next-generation CAD collaboration tools.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Solvers and Tools
• Computer Vision: 3D Computer Vision

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for incomplete, noisy, or partially observed Web-related graphs

Abstract

In today's landscape, hardware development teams face increasing demands for better quality products, greater innovation, and shorter manufacturing lead times. Despite the need for more efficient and effective processes, hardware designers continue to struggle with a lack of awareness of design changes and other collaborators' actions, a persistent issue in decades of CSCW research. One significant and unaddressed challenge is understanding and managing dependencies between 3D CAD (computer-aided design) models, especially when products can contain thousands of interconnected components. In this two-phase formative study, we explore designers' pain points of CAD dependency management through a thematic analysis of 100 online forum discussions and semi-structured interviews with 10 designers. We identify nine key challenges related to the traceability, navigation, and consistency of CAD dependencies, that harm the effective coordination of hardware development teams. To address these challenges, we propose design goals and necessary features to enhance hardware designers' awareness and management of dependencies, ultimately with the goal of improving collaborative workflows.

Problem

• Understanding and managing dependencies between 3D CAD models
• Improving traceability, navigation, and consistency of CAD dependencies
• Enhancing awareness and management of dependencies for better collaboration

Innovation

• Thematic analysis of 100 online forums
• Semi-structured interviews with 10 designers
• Proposed design goals for dependency management