Besides design theory and practice, curricula of architectural students should include some experiences referring to professional situations. Among these experiences, Collaborative Design is nowadays somewhat frequent. It is normally practised by large professional studios, using expansive software which is beyond what they can afford on average. Much academic research on the topic has also been carried out often resulting in the proposition of new and too complex description models of the building object. We think that students should instead get acquainted with such a design process: an experience has been planned and carried out in our Department for the purpose of practising the possible paradigm in a more ordinary context. Its purpose was threefold. First, making the students grasp the methodis potentialities and learn the right approach. Second, testing the practical suitability of the most widely used software. Third, comparing their relative efficiency. The software we used was: Architectural Desktop, AutoCad Revit, ArchiCad for Teamwork. We focused special attention on how representing and managing restraints, since they are the main source of conflicts. This was the hardest topic to manage. The results were partly positive inasmuch as the experience showed that it could be possible to adopt the Collaborative Design paradigm which is also used in the AEC field. The drawbacks emerged from the analysis of non-dedicated software are: a relative slow process for the lack of certain specific tools, a subsequent necessity of integrating them with different communication software, the difficulty of managing hard and soft restraints. However, in the final analysis, the experience can be considered as positive
