The number of variables acting upon urban landscapes is numerous and interconnected, closely resembling complex systems in constant dynamic transformation. Current analytical methods and descriptions of the city are domain specific, limited in scope, and discretize the city into quantifiable individual representations, resulting in an equally limited urban policy and design. If we are to produce urban systems capable of contributing to the robustness and resiliency of cities, we ought to understand and represent the comprehensive network of actors that construct contemporary urban landscapes. On one hand, the natural sciences approach the analysis of complex systems by primarily focusing on the development of models capable of describing their stochastic formation, remaining agnostic to the contextual properties of their individual components and oftentimes discretizing the otherwise continuous relationships among parts. signers work in groups. They need to share information either synchronously or asynchronously as they work with parametric modeling software, as with all computer-aided design tools. Receiving information from collaborators while working may intrude on their work and thought processes. Little research exists on how the reception of design updates influences designers in their work. Nor do we know much about designer preferences for collaboration. In this paper, we examine how sharing and receiving design updates affects designers’ performances and preferences. We present a system prototype to share changes on demand or in continuous mode while performing design tasks. A pilot study measuring the preferences of nine pairs of designers for different combinations of control modes and design tasks shows statistically significant differences between the task types and control modes. The types of tasks affect the preferences of users to the types of control modes. In an apparent contradiction, user preference of control modes contradicts task performance time.
