I am working on my Masters project with Kurt Luther and Amy Bruckman. We are looking at how people collaborate on artistic projects online. For my part of the project, I am specifically looking at 3d collaboration on several popular 3d graphic communities. Kurt has been looking at collaboration in Flash animation.

It would seem that there should be more collaboration overall in 3d graphics because the project roles are very separated and well-defined and because the pieces created can be reused even if the project itself fails, but we are not finding this to be the case. One of the driving questions behind my part of the research is why this is so. We will also be looking at the similarities between the 2d and 3d collaborations to find general patterns in online creative collaborations and perhaps come up with ways that people can work better together on these types of projects.

Addendum: My part of the research on this project is now complete, though Kurt is continuing to work on other aspects of online collaboration in creative projects as part of his Ph.D. work. One of these days I will get around to putting findings from the reasearch up online.