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IT in Collaborative Design. - IT_CODE
Prof Per Christiansson
Aalborg University, Denmark
Meeting at NIRAS
Wednesday April 14, kl 12.00
Aalborg
Analyses, demonstrations and requirements formulation on IT support in collaborative early design involving client, architects, engineers, and external product suppliers.
Introduction
It is well documented that lack of efficient and reliable information within the building industry leads to low end product quality and more serious failures. Information Technology, IT, tools must be further developed and adapted for reliable support in connection with communication within and between specialists, documentation of the building product during it's life time, and support of underlying processes from the program phase to operation and use of the building.
Goals
The project will answer questions like;
- How can IT support collaborative work in the early design phases?
- How will individual working method change?
- How can competence collaboration be strengthened and how can the design process be documented to serve as an efficient project memory?
The project will focus on,
- requirements formulation on IT-tools to support engineering architecture routine and creative collaboration
- analyses of working methods in collaborative multidisciplinary design,
- demonstrator development to support the research process itself as well as capture, communicate, implement and evaluate ideas together with practitioners,
- development of a simple building process core model forming fundament for the common digital work space.
Relevance
The project focuses on central and not well understood problems in connection with IT-supported collaborative work in one of the most essential parts of the building process namely the early design and program phases.
A holistic view is taken in order to better understand and map a complex process comprising issues like
- computer models for design team dynamic memory,
- meta language for communicating design intent between and within participating specialist groups,
- product models to support work on shared work spaces partly independent of time and space.
Context
- communication within and between specialists
- vendor product information
- complex project organization of the building industry together with higher international involvement
- support the maintenance and use of he final buildings and provide subsequent experience data.
- realistic simulations
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Research focus
Some of the central research issues in this connection are
- formal descriptions and meta languages to facilitate communication between and within design/construction team and product suppliers (Christiansson, 1998), (aecXML)
- requirements on multimedia and virtual reality interfaces to support engineering architecture collaboration
- why and how formal temporal building process properties may be included in these descriptions to facilitate building sub processes integration
- influences of meta level information models, and dependencies between multimedia presentation and application model views
- development of a demonstrator involving practice participation and requirements formulation
The project will focus on,
- requirements formulation on IT-tools (multimedia and virtual reality interfaces as well as model handling and communication) to support engineering architecture routine and creative collaboration
- analyses of working methods in collaborative multidisciplinary design
- demonstrator development to support the research process itself as well as capture, communicate, implement and evaluate ideas together with practitioners
- development of a simple building process core model forming fundament for the common digital work space.
Methods and resources
We focus on the very important but less formalized initial design/sketch and client requirement formulation phases.
Methods and resources to carry through the research
- connection to a test house design and construction
- collaboration is intended to be established with Cad- and CSCW-system vendors as Archicad/Graphisoft for model implementation and team work partly using existing IT supported design tools
- incremental prototyping with end user participation (demonstrator development). The work will be a combination of incremental prototyping and continuous usability tests done in a distributed environment. It is our intent to use several different methodologies that can be used in combination e.g. Heuristic evaluation, (Nielsen & Mack , 1994) and Contextual Design (Beyer & Holzblatt , 1997)
- collaboration with Stanford University, Project Based Learning Laboratory, Civil and Environmental Engineering on new IT-tools to support and capture collaborative design
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