Services in Digital Design: New Visions for AEC-Field Collaboration

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to describe contemporary digital building design from a service provider aspect. The constrained framework of this work is digital architectural design practice. When design is seen in the context of the AEC field, a process oriented approach is commonly used in describing collaboration and evolutionary progress of the design work as a project. Design projects are scheduled chains of activities which result in design delivery or actual physical buildings as the end products of the project. Recently developments in building information modelling (BIM) have presented fundamentally new ways for collecting, exploring, and sharing design information. This study develops the novel digital approach: BIM as design services. The key finding of the study is that parts of the design domain can be described as services in the changing digital environment. The scientific contribution of this paper is in describing contemporary digital design practice with an alternative service approach. A framework for such services is also presented. This work will expand the authors' contribution to research on preliminary architectural design using building information models.