Media support for elicitation in virtual multidisciplinary design

Abstract

Conflicts and disputes are usually found in multidisciplinary design process. Well maintained conflicts will lead to support the achievement of best design. Conversely, the bad ones will lead to failures and unfinished design. Competition and also market's needs and desires have encouraged industries as well as their design managers to innovate their product design, especially in construction industries. Rapid development of commercial properties has forced design teams to innovate their works. Multidisciplinary parties are needed in dealing with this reality. Experts with various disciplines and backgrounds are essentially involved in design process. Virtual design turns into practical solution in dealing with the issues of time and place availability between parties. Additionally, technical conflicts appear as result of failure in managing the process of design development and its design elicitation. This issue is found to be the most frequent issue that is able to drive the success of virtual design. This study aims to reveal critical factors of media support for elicitation in virtual design process through exploratory studies. First, the factors are revealed from literature and case study, than they are confirmed to design managers. Depth analysis on these factors is carried out by two statistical methods. The analyses use comparison of mean and standard deviation and also factor analysis. Communication is found to be the most critical factor that is needed to be mainly considered in using the media support to facilitate the virtual design process. Conceptual framework that is resulted from this study will contribute to develop research in collaborative design as well as communication system and media support for virtual multidisciplinary design.