P3: an Integrated Environment to Support Design Collaboration

Buildings are the combined product of the efforts of many participants interacting in complex ways over a prolonged period of time. Currently, sequential communication among the participants is the standard means of collaboration. This method, which is well suited to current legal and professional practices, is inefficient, fraught with loss of information and prone to errors, cost and schedule overruns, and promotes optimization of individual parts at the expense of the overall project. This paper describes an integrated design environment that will facilitate collaborative decision making among the various participants, not merely communicate the results of decisions made by one participant to the other participants in the design team. It is based on the convergence of computing and telecommunication technologies, coupled with the emergence of new design paradigms, which together can overcome the technical difficulties associate with current collaborative design practices. It comprises three different modules: a product model, a performance model, and a process model (hence it is called P3). The paper presents each of these models and their integration into a unified framework.