A concurrent design paradigm for interdisciplinary design collaboration: insights from focus group study

Abstract: Current building design collaboration follows a siloed and sequential workflow, leading to cumbersome manual rework, multiple files and versions, etc. Designers struggle to meet the demands of modern construction projects in terms of time, cost, quality and sustainability. Interdisciplinary collaboration can be greatly improved through a new paradigm that entails synchronous collaboration with reinvented functions within BIM technologies. To explore this new paradigm, we adopted the design science approach with five steps. The results validate the importance of inter-domain design change, strongly support the case for the utility of the use case scenarios, and recommend several directions for future research.