Collaborative Knowledge Construction in Digital Free-Form Design

This paper focuses on the emerging domain of digital free-form design, and attempts to explicate its knowledge content and characteristics through a systematic inquiry of the digital free-form design practice. The massive amount of information associated with the design and construction demands of the complexly shaped buildings demand explicit knowledge about the way various information pieces relate to one another. This paper reports on the process of developing a knowledge framework which serves as a reference model to describe and explain the free-form design and production processes in terms of the interaction of contextual conditions and according to the different ways design problems are perceived and formulated by the members of the design teams. The framework provides guidelines for the development of a web-based design decision support system to support collaborative knowledge construction, sharing and reuse in the domain.