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Characterizing bottlenecks in building design coordination meetings

International Construction Specialty Conference (5th : 2015 : Vancouver, B.C.); Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

We conducted an ethnographic study of design coordination meetings to better understand the challenges faced by project teams as they coordinate designs in multi-disciplinary meeting environments. This ethnographic study involved observation and analysis of twenty-seven design coordination meetings from the design development phase of a high performance institutional research building. Design coordination and conflict detection are two of the most common and highly valued uses of Building Information Modeling (BIM). However, in our observations of these meetings, we found that BIM tools were extremely under-utilized. This research identified and characterized the bottlenecks encountered during these in-person design coordination meetings. We observed meeting bottlenecks when meeting activities were performed inefficiently, when the meeting process was slowed down, when meeting workflow was interrupted, or when decision-making was hindered. We identified and characterized meeting bottlenecks in a framework that illustrates the nature of each bottleneck and the frequency of its occurrence. According to our observations, we identified five types of bottlenecks that hindered the efficiency of design coordination meetings: people, meeting environment, drawings, interaction/access and information. We anticipate that these findings will help to inform the development of better meeting processes, the design of new interaction, visualization, and integration technologies that better support the meeting processes of design teams.

Text

2015-05-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/53636

Froese, T. M., Newton, L., Sadeghpour, F. & Vanier, D. J. (EDs.) (2015). Proceedings of ICSC15: The Canadian Society for Civil Engineering 5th International/11th Construction Specialty Conference, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. June 7-10.

Faculty; Other

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