ABSTRACT
Collaborative engagement in research and education often involves the need for a shared workspace among participants. With improved web-based technologies, and limitations to in-person interactions presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, educators and researchers need to adapt their methods and tools to support meaningful engagement. We reflect on our experiences and iterative experiments navigating these challenges in the domains of design education and design research. As design educators, our team utilized various online platforms including video conferencing, whiteboards, spreadsheets, surveys, and polling tools, to support teaching and student collaboration. As design researchers working in the domain of maternal healthcare, we borrowed from our experiences in the classroom and applied some of these tools to our research with patient and clinician stakeholders, to support data collection and research team collaboration. In this paper, we elaborate on these experiences by drawing from examples across our teaching and research activities to share key strengths, challenges, and considerations of the online workspaces, with a particular focus on online whiteboards. We compare the two settings and reflect on barriers and facilitators of online engagement specific to these. Lastly, we suggest recommendations for designing online activities and selecting appropriate online tools based on the objective, contextual needs, and the affordances of tools and activities. Our findings may support decisions of educators, designers, and researchers in planning for online engagement. © Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education: Disrupt, Innovate, Regenerate and Transform, E and PDE 2022. All rights reserved.