Abstract
Today, BIM technologies in collaborative practice are widespread among construction project stakeholders. However, embracing either distributed or collocated tasks in collaborative practices is a complex, challenging activity. Each team member (actor) views collaborative design problems from a different ‘lens’, framed by the realities of their disciplines, experiences, and levels of engagement on tasks. The effect is a practice prone to conflict generation and misunderstandings among actors. BIM technologies and teamwork should be configured to adapt to one another in practice dynamically. The configuration should enable the effective performance of distributed and collocated work tasks. The presented study investigates these configurations to reveal constitutive aspects of how work should be executed in practice. The study focuses on adapting technology and teamwork to reveal a more effective way of delivering distributed and collocated work tasks. To explore the research question, two components were developed: a theoretical framework and a technology conceptualization. The framework presents fundamental constitutive elements in the coordination process. It illustrates the key aspects that draw the configurations of technology and teamwork. The technology concept is a design to assist in the execution of the tasks for coordination activities. It addresses the constitutive aspects of coordination for BIM processes in practice. The technology concept, named BIMbot, is a cognitive assistant that informs and advises on activities, engages team members together in a task, and facilitates fundamental actions for shared understandings, physical support, and informed advice. This paper contributes to shedding light on the difficulties for team members to reach a shared understanding of knowledge when they use BIM technologies. It presents the first development of the design of technology that provides actionable information to coordinate activities.
Highlights
It has been nearly two decades since Building Information Modelling (BIM) reached a level of widespread use in the architecture, engineering and construction industry (Eastman et al, 2018, Mehrbod et al, 2019)
Research on coordination tasks will shed light on what aspects of technology and teamwork should be configured to effectively execute distributed and collocated work. The emphases of these questions depart from the view of mainstream research, which has focused primarily on BIM affordances for coordination (e.g., BIM technology capabilities and its tools for coordinating design team members) and on barriers to constitutive aspects of technology use (e.g., BIM and other technologies enactments for its use in coordinating tasks)
2.2 Communicative action in BIM processes: communicative act Communicative actions engage the fieldwork of engineers, architects, contractors, and all associated team members in BIM processes, such as the actions in the BIM room (Merschbrock and Munkvold, 2015)
Summary
It has been nearly two decades since Building Information Modelling (BIM) reached a level of widespread use in the architecture, engineering and construction industry (Eastman et al, 2018, Mehrbod et al, 2019). Participating actors from multiple disciplines – ranging from mechanical to structural to construction engineering to architecture – intervene across organizational boundaries within and (or) between firms in BIM collaborative practices They engage in distributed and collocated, collaborative, and technology-ready tasks. Research on coordination tasks will shed light on what aspects of technology and teamwork should be configured to effectively execute distributed and collocated work The emphases of these questions depart from the view of mainstream research, which has focused primarily on BIM affordances for coordination (e.g., BIM technology capabilities and its tools for coordinating design team members) and on barriers (e.g., technologies that make the BIM process less effective in practice) to constitutive aspects of technology use (e.g., BIM and other technologies enactments for its use in coordinating tasks). The initial architecture is based on the current state of the art in natural language processing techniques
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