A presentation I gave to the Auckland Revit Users Group on my PhD research into improving digital architectural collaboration. The presentation summarises the key topics within my thesis Building Digital Bridges thesis.

1. Building Digital Bridges
David Harrison
Presentation to the Auckland Revit User Group
15th February 2012

2. What will I cover?
• Enabling more effective digital collaboration.
• Collaboration challenges & Building Stories.
• Digital impediments to effective collaboration.
• BIM solves everything right?
• Project Information Clouds - Learning from the Web.
• The Principles of Hyperlinked Practice.
• Testing the Principles.
• Looking ahead.

3. Who am I?
• BArch and PhD in Architecture from VUW.
• Started I.T. consulting and software development
business in 2003.
• In 2011 Kerry, Alex and I founded Triptech.
• Our goal is to provide great I.T. advice and services
within the NZ building industry.

4. How is this relevant to you?
• Revit is a means to an end.
• The digital model is an island in a sea
of relationships and design issues.
• If bored ponder this:
How are Revit’s subscription costs
influencing your company’s overall
digital collaboration strategy
(if you have one)?

5. Goal: Google Googles
for architects
www.google.com
What is the state and design history of this part of the building?

6. Why? “Betterer” digital
collaboration
To make sense of the design information digitally stored
within email, images, CAD, BIM, documents, etc.

7. Thesis aim:
To promote more
effective collaboration
by improving access to
timely and relevant
project information

8. collaboration requires a more pragmatic approach, that appropriately applies cooperation,
coordination and collaboration to move the project forward and resolve design issues.
Why is collaboration a problem?
Figure 2.1: Diagram illustrating the hypothetical bene t of cooperation, coordination
and collaboration to architectural decision making and the e ort required to achieve
High
Effort to achieve Collaboration
Coordination
Cooperation
Low High
Benefit to architectural decision making
Figure 2.1 illustrates the theoretical effort required to achieve the three different forms of
architectural collaboration, and the implied benefit to the decision making process. For the

9. Architecture projects are unique
and complex environments
www.onemansblog.com

10. Project teams exist within a
segmented industry

11. Participants do not understand
the justification behind decisions
www.graphicdesignblog.org

12. Time extremes restrict and
erode knowledge
Figure 3.5: The e ort/time relationship between BIM and traditional digital modelling
methods, relative to the cost of design changes (As found in: MacLeamy, 2010)
Cost of design changes
Effort
BIM Traditional
Ability to control cost
Prog Design Development Documentation Construction
Time
3.2.3. BIM in Practice

13. example, the students developed this understanding during the second half of the
semester in conjunction with members of the project team.
Idea: Building Stories can
• Recalling - The overall Building Story, which includes its component events,
activities and artefacts, is presented to relevant parties in a manner that can be easily
improve access to timely and
consumed. In the academic example, the students published their compiled Building
Stories to a public website where anyone with an internet connection could access it.
relevant information
Figure 4.1: The four phases of Building Story construction and utilisation
Recording Reflecting Rendering Recalling
Context Context Events Context Events
Story Story Story
Participants create and share Appreciate the overall process Identify significant events Expose to relevant parties in order
the activities and artefacts and the context of the project to flesh out in more detail to improve collective understanding
For the purposes of simplicity and completeness Heylighen, Martin and Cavallin

14. process. This circular pattern “means that there is no clear segregation between imaging,
presenting and testing, but a significant relationship in which each depends on the
other” (Schneider & Petzold, 2009, p. 207). Communication patterns which break these
Why? Building Stories
relationships harm the design process. The Building Story’s use of artefacts (imaging),
activities (presenting) and events (testing) reinforces this circular pattern (see Figure 2.5),
which leads to a more consistent, and therefore effective, collaborative design process.
reinforce the design process
Figure 2.5: Design as a circular process and its relationship to the events, activities and
artefacts within a Building Story
(Based on diagram in: Schneider & Petzold, 2009, p. 206)
Activities (Imaging)
Design Task
Experience
Thoughts & Ideas
Perception
Events (Testing)
Artifacts
Design Tools
Artifacts (Presenting)
33

15. What changes did the
digital migration bring?
• Boundless information transfer
• The overcoming of geographic and organisational
boundaries
• Virtually free communication
• More frequent interactions within the team

16. Problem: Coping with the influx
of information within a vacuum
• Information density
It is easier to send everything than what is needed
• Digital overload
An email has no perceived cost
• Distance
Trust and understanding is difficult to foster “virtually”

17. Problem: Inconsistent industry
adoption and digital fragmentation
Figure 3.9: The digital fragmentation caused by the technologies used within the project
team (As found in: Björk, 1995, p. 11)
Healing this digital fragmentation will require a new, more permeable layer of information,

18. The trend towards
Building Information Modelling

19. Today what isn’t BIM?
• BIM can be product
• BIM can be a delivery process
• BIM can be an attitude to information
...so is a neat stack of pencil drawings BIM?

20. BIM is a Revolution

21. BIM is an Evolution
Figure 3.6: The adoption of BIM within projects
(As found in: Young, Jones & Bernstein, 2007, p. 11)
A recent Erabuild survey found that “BIM is used in around 20% of projects for architects

22. BIM is just Marketing
“After a bit of jawboning with Bentley’s
marketing folks, I got their agreement to use BIM
as the top-level descriptive term for their latest
design software. With Bentley and Autodesk both
humming the BIM tune, we’ve covered well over
80% of the USA market At an 80% tipping point,
the dominos should fall into place for the rest of
the market.”
Jerry Laiserin, 2002

23. BIM software archetypes
• BIM on the desktop
Revit, ArchiCAD, etc.
• BIM within the team
Revit Worksets, linked drawings
• BIM on the server
BIMServer, Graphisoft BIM Server
• ...BIM in the “Cloud”?
Do two buzzwords make a right?

24. Problem: BIM complexity
reduces participation
www.funny-pictures-blog.com

25. Problem: Rigid centralisation
filters information

26. Problem: Virtual accuracy
confuses practical reality
www.amazingdata.com

27. within a project information cloud can be analysed using the concept of PageRank (Page,
Brin, Motwani & Winograd, 1998) to identify significant digital messages and resources.
This significance is based on how many hyperlinks within the project information cloud
Idea: Evolve our important role during the designof project
perception process.
link to a digital message or resource. Thus, if a large number of hyperlinks point to an
artefact, it is likely to have played an
information to be more like the Web...
Figure 4.2: The distributed nature of a project’s information cloud
Organisation Organisation
Organisation
75

28. and hyperlinks to relevant digital messages and resources within the cloud. This process of
highlighting digital artefacts within the project’s information cloud is illustrated in Figure
4.3. Wikis have been shown to be ideally suited to this task, because they allow the
..then wetocan constructoverview of a design-related event
interested parties collectively craft a comprehensive Building Stories
within Project Information Clouds
(Burry, Burrow, Amor & Burry, 2005).
Figure 4.3: Constructing a Building Story event within a project’s information cloud
Event
Building Story
Design information
Images and documents
Digital messages
Email and other messaging
Services
Digital models
BIM and CAD
Architectural
Documentation
PDF and DWF
Project timeline
4.2.3. The need for fundamental principles of Hyperlinked Practice

29. Getting there from here?
• There is no simple or single answer.
• It is a multi-faceted problem, with information,
process, legal and industry barriers to overcome.
• For my thesis I identified and tested a set of
principles that could guide technology decisions
towards this goal.

30. Use the principles of the Web
as a foundation
www.telegraph.co.uk

31. Situational awareness
Digital collaboration tools should integrate into the surrounding
environment, so that changes that may affect the project are
automatically recorded and presented to the team.

32. Ubiquity
The digital collaboration environment should be based on
commonly used processes and technologies, so that any team
member may access or contribute to the project’s digital record.

33. Comprehension
All team members should be capable of understanding the
purpose, implementation and operation of the project’s digital
collaboration tools, so that they can appropriately use them in
the recording of the design process.

34. Context sensitivity
Digital collaboration tools should understand and reflect the
organisation and current state of the project, so that team
members are presented with information that is relevant to the
design process and their role within it.

35. Emulative modularity
The recording and recalling of the design process should not
depend on a specific technology or party. Therefore, the digital
collaboration environment should be capable of being
reproduced or extended by a third-party.

36. Emotive semantics
The digital collaboration environment should not dictate the
semantic system used to record or reflect upon the design
process. Instead, the team should be able to define a
vocabulary that reflects the uniqueness of each project.

37. Decentralisation
The digital collaboration environment should respect the team’s
distributed nature and broad requirements, by not demanding
that the design process be recorded in a location that is difficult
to access, or controlled by a single party.

38. Validating the principles
• Need to demonstrate that a digital collaboration tool
that embodies these principles promotes access to
timely and relevant information.
• Two testing streams:
The Reasonate software prototype,
and thought experiments applied to emerging
communication tools.

39. Reasonate
• A software prototype that embodied the principles of
Hyperlinked Practice.
• Made predictions on collaboration behavior and
compared these to recorded actions.
• Tested the prototype within a Victoria University
architectural computing class.

42. functionality struggled to gain traction. Students had little content to publish during the
first week of testing, but by the third week the daily number of published posts had reached
a strong and relatively consistent level of approximately 16 per day (see Figure 8.10). The
Test results were extensively
tagging functionality was tested by students when it was introduced, but as illustrated in
analysed for patterns
Figure 8.11, it did not achieve the same level of consistent use.
Figure 8.10: The daily growth and running total of posts published to Reasonate
2000 200
Tutorial hand-in (20/3) Assignment 2 hand-in (1/6)
1750 175
Assignment 1 final hand-in (8/6)
1500 150
Growth in posts per day
Build-up to Assignment
Total number of posts
1 interim hand-in (15/5)
1250 125
1000 100
750 75
500 50
250 25
0 0
1/3 9/3 17/3 25/3 2/4 10/4 18/4 26/4 4/5 12/5 20/5 28/5 5/6 13/6
Date
Total number of posts Growth in posts per day Average overall growth
Figure 8.11: The daily growth and running total of tags created within Reasonate

43. dy_j_initi
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great dy_pland plans ess
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not bad dy_h_re
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dy_powe nders
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44. Thought experiments
• Applied and discussed the principles to two
emerging communication technologies:
Social networking (Project Bluestreak) and
micro-blogging (Twitter).
• This led to discussions with Autodesk and a very
good post (if I may say so myself):
“Autodesk Beyond Desktop CAD & BIM”
http://stress-free.co.nz/autodesk_beyond_desktop_cad_and_bim

45. These tests demonstrated that
the principles are useful for:
• Guiding the development of new and existing digital
collaboration tools.
• Improving decision making around digital
collaboration strategy.

46. Where to next? A project aggregator
Timeline
Project
Architects Description Location, type
MSG MSG MSG MSG MSG
Client client@email.com
Architects employee1@architect.com RPY RPY
Connector employee2@architect.com
Engineer employee@engineer.com MSG
Consultant employee@consultant.com RPY RPY FWD MSG
Contractor manager@contractor.com RPY RPY
foreman@contractor.com Messages
glazier@subcontractor.com
Contractors
Connector
People
DWG DWG DWG
DOC XLS
Engineers JPG
JPG
JPG
JPG DOC
JPG JPG
JPG JPG DOC
JPG JPG
Files
Connector
Project Concept Development Consent
Construction
Aggregator
Brief Evaluation
Tags Contracts Documentation Problem
Client Wiki summary
Comment
Constraint: Messages between A+B
Constraint: People C, D, E Comment
Connector Constraint: Tagged F, G, H, I
Comment
Constraint: Files of type X Comment
Comment
Comment
Building Stories

47. You can wake up now...
• Thesis download:
http://stress-free.co.nz/files/thesis.pdf
• Twitter:
@triptechnz or @dharrisonnz
• If you would like to talk more contact us:
http://triptech.net