Advanced Information Technology today gives us the opportunity to implement sophisticated distributed systems for collaborative design. Persons with different interests and competencies in the building process such as architects, installation engineers, structural engineers, clients, and builders can all at least theoretically be brought together in a distributed design space where a virtual building is drafted, designed, built, and functionally evaluated. A design space built in a virtual reality environment will enable us to realistically and efficiently simulate the form, function, construction, and use of the building under consideration. The paper presents experiences from the early phases of user requirements formulations and design of such collaborative design spaces. The findings are mainly based on collaborative university and consultant engineering company work done in the EU IST-project 'Distributed Virtual Workspace for enhancing Communication within the Construction Industry - DIVERCITY' as well as experiences from student collaboration in distributed learning environments and earlier research within the area. The early conceptual design of the virtual workspace follows the so called Contextual Design methodology which gives input to the subsequent data modelling work and implementation in an object oriented web distributed environment. The method used is described and examples on resulting Work Models (work flow, sequence and artefact models) are presented and commented on