Scalable Enterprise Systems: Designing Construction Information Workspaces: Making Information Work for Project Teams

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0075672FischerThis grant provides funding for the exploratory development of a new kind of construction information technology: construction information workspace (CIW). A CIW is an interactive environment that visually communicates construction project information and their inter-relationships to support group tasks, such as project review, coordination and decision-making. CIW visualizations will be specified and prototyped based on observations of project meetings on planned and on-going capital facility projects and based on existing information visualizations in science and engineering. Mechanisms or filters will be formalized and implemented to generate these visualizations based on information obtained from state-of-the-art desktop tools currently in use in the construction industry (e.g., 3D CAD, project management software) and based on emerging integrated information systems. Through observations in practice and through tests with practitioners in the CIW, metrics will be developed to assess the usefulness of the developed visualizations to support group tasks. The CIW will be implemented in the _'Information Workspace' currently under development in Computer Graphics and Human Computer Interaction research groups in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.If successful the results of this research will provide a roadmap for the development of construction information workspaces. Observations have shown that current single-user human computer interaction tools are inappropriate for group use. Therefore, the roadmap will include guidelines for the design of visualizations to support group tasks, examples of the types of mechanisms needed to generate the visualizations from databases and legacy software, and metrics to evaluate whether a particular visualization will be useful for group tasks. CIWs will reduce the state of information overload often observed on projects today. They will make the currently static project information interactive. They will help a team share the focus of a discussion through visually representing the critical relationships between project information. Therefore, teams will be more likely to make better decisions and use available project information in a strategic and not just reactive way. The construction domain provides a challenging application domain for _'information workspaces' because of the large number of stakeholders involved in a project and because of the large and frequently changing sets of various types of information necessary to describe a project. Hence the results from this research will likely be useful in other domains.