Capturing Histories of Design Processes for Collaborative Building Design Development

Abstract

The ADS Project — Advanced Design Support for the Construction Design Process — builds on the technological results of the previous COMMIT Project to exploit and demonstrate the benefits of a CAD based Design Decision Support System. COMMIT provides a system for storing knowledge about knowledge within the design process. It records design decisions, the actors who take them and the roles they play when doing so. ADS links COMMIT to an existing object-oriented CAD system, MicroStation/J from Bentley Systems. The project focuses on tackling the problem of managing design information without intruding too much on the design process itself. It provides the possibility to effectively link design decisions back to requirements, to gather rationale information for later stages of the building lifecycle, and to gather knowledge of rationale for later projects. The system enables members of the project team, including clients and constructors, to browse and search the recorded project history of decision making both during and after design development. ADS aims to facilitate change towards a more collaborative process in construction design, to improve the effectiveness of decision-making throughout the construction project and to provide clients with the facility to relate design outcomes to design briefs across the whole building life cycle. In this paper we will describe the field trials of the ADS prototype carried out over a three-month period at the Building Design Partnership (BDP) Manchester office. The objective of these trials is to assess the extent, to which the approach underlying ADS enhances the design process, and to gather and document the views and experiences of practitioners. The ADS prototype was previously tested with historical data of real project (Peng, Cerulli et al. 2000). To gather more valuable knowledge about how a Decision Support System like ADS can be used in practice, the testing and evaluation will be extended to a real project, while it is still ongoing. The live case study will look at some phases of the design of a mixed residential and retail development in Leeds, UK, recording project information while it is created. The users’ feedback on the system usability will inform the continuous redevelopment process that will run in parallel to the live case study. The ADS and COMMIT Projects were both funded by EPSRC.