Building Design Team Research Articles

Updated American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers Guidelines and Standards on Sustainable Systems Design.

Many designers look for guidance with the various standards targeting sustainable, green buildings. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air‐Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) publishes a number of useful design resources related to green buildings. The resources are widely used among mechanical systems engineers and facilities designers. This talk will present an overview of several ASHRAE resources which include acoustics aspects. “ASHRAE Green Guide: The Design, Construction and Operation of Sustainable Buildings” is a book to teach designers how to effectively participate on green building design teams and fundamental green design concepts. The book takes an integrated building systems perspective by addressing how engineered systems interact with and are influenced by architectural design. It also includes guidance on the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED® rating system. ASHRAE is also in the final stages of preparing a new Standard for High‐Performance Green Buildings (Standard 189.1). This Standard is co‐sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council. Standard 189.1 is being written as an ANSI‐level Standard and intended for adoption into state and local building codes.

Physical and Digital Artifact-Mediated Coordination in Building Design

We conducted an ethnographic field study examining how a building design team used representational artifacts to coordinate the design of building systems, structure, and architecture. The goals of this study were to characterize the different interactions meeting participants had with design artifacts, to identify bottlenecks in the design coordination process, and to develop design considerations for CSCW technology that will support in-person design coordination meetings of building design teams. We found that gesturing, navigation, annotation, and viewing were the four primary interactions meeting participants had with design artifacts. The form of the design information (2D vs. 3D, digital vs. physical) had minimal impact on gesture interactions, although navigation varied significantly with different representations of design information. Bottlenecks in the design process were observed when meeting participants attempted to navigate digital information, interact with wall displays, and access information individually and as a group. Based on our observations, we present some possible directions for future CSCW technologies, including new mechanisms for digital bookmarking, interacting with 2D and 3D design artifacts simultaneously, and enriched pointing techniques and pen functionality.

Base-building architectural and engineering acoustic concerns unique to museums and exhibit environments

Museums, especially those with intensive multimedia programs, require special attention by the base building design team to ensure that the final aural experience throughout the exhibit galleries is optimized. Often, exhibit galleries and public spaces are designed with minimal attention placed on the acoustic environment. There are countless new and old museums that suffer from excessive liveness, extremely noisy mechanical/electrical systems, and significant bleed between multiple sound sources. The author will describe the importance of addressing the above issues, how the base building design team interfaces with the exhibit design team, and present some case study examples of how improperly designed museum buildings could have a detrimental impact on the acoustic function of the exhibit experience.

Managing the selection of energy saving features in building design

This paper discusses how project management styles and methods impact on energy conscious design decisions by building design teams. Within the broad field of energy conscious design the emphasis of this paper is on the selection of energy saving technologies in appropriately configured building components. The premise of the research is that these selections are not well rationalized. Choices of energy saving features in current practice are discussed against the background of available computational tools and the way these tools are used (or not) to enhance the decision‐making process. Through empirical data gathering based on case studies, improved project management techniques that enable a more timely and rational selection of energy saving technologies will be identified. A follow‐up research project that implements the findings in an operational design system is briefly presented to sketch the practical implications of the reported research.

Managing the selection of energy saving features in building design

This paper discusses how project management styles and methods impact on energy conscious design decisions by building design teams. Within the broad field of energy conscious design the emphasis of this paper is on the selection of energy saving technologies in appropriately configured building components. The premise of the research is that these selections are not well rationalized. Choices of energy saving features in current practice are discussed against the background of available computational tools and the way these tools are used (or not) to enhance the decision‐making process. Through empirical data gathering based on case studies, improved project management techniques that enable a more timely and rational selection of energy saving technologies will be identified. A follow‐up research project that implements the findings in an operational design system is briefly presented to sketch the practical implications of the reported research.

Architectural design management within the digital design team

In this paper, the possibilities for implementing modern Internet‐based ICT tools for the management of architectural design teams are explored. The theory of Davenport on information ecology, Schön's approach to design thinking and design team behaviour, and decision process management and information technology theories are combined in a proposal for the design of project‐based digital design teams. It is argued that the implementation of the so‐called Project Web Site (PWS) Technology may lead to significant improvement of architectural design team performance. The structure of the PWS within this specific context is described as well as implications for the working procedures and the management of building design teams.

Priorities in Building Envelope Design

Sustainability of the building investment depends upon the technological capability of buildings to facilitate their upgrading of systems, to meet changing expectations of building users, and adequ...

Capital costs versus costs-in-use: a content analysis of design team member communication patterns

The verbal interaction of a number of building design teams was observed, recorded and analyzed using content analysis. A pilot and main study design team were observed on a longditudinal basis while a range of validation design teams were observed on a cross sectional basis. Variations in the communication content of individual design team members were recorded and measured in relation to a number of specific interest areas. One interest area was the measurement of the reconciliation between capital costs and expected costs-in-use, as a function of design team communication content in the pre-contract design stages. This paper considers the development of design team communication, particularly conflict development, in relation to the essential incompatibilities between capital cost minimization and cost in use optimization objectives and how this relates to design team development.