Technology-enabled collaborative spaces for design and construction reviews

Design is an important phase of the facility life cycle as it has a direct impact on overall performance, cost and success. Collaboration in design increasingly involves the use of digital technologies to help geographically dispersed team members and stakeholders to visualise and interact with project information to make decisions. Collaboration can be either co-located or remote, and in both instances benefit from digital technologies ranging from audio, video, or web conferencing to more advanced immersive room-based systems, designed to deliver different types of user experiences. This paper discusses the use of digital technologies for collaborative working on project tasks in synchronous remote and co-located settings, and rehearses the considerations required when designing and delivering technology-enabled collaborative spaces (TeCS). Following an initial review of the related research work in these areas, an integrated approach to the design of TeCS is proposed together with a framework to support the capture of user requirements, deployment and use of TeCS. The end users’ appropriation of such spaces in shaping team collaboration beyond the initial technology assumptions is also explored. It is expected that this will help inform the design and evolution of future TeCS for co-located and remote work settings, as well as guide in developing a framework for evaluating successful deployment and use of TeCS in design and construction projects