Revit Add-In for Documenting Design Decisions and Rationale, a Bim-Based Tool to Capture Tacit Design Knowledge and Support Its Reuse

Abstract

The building design is a problem-solving process in which the demands of the customer are turned into a design job. Throughout the design process, several specialists from various fields cooperate to develop the final design. The key deliverables that are exchanged and passed over are the generated designs. However, no explanation of design intentions or evidence of argumentations behind the design decisions is included in the design deliverables. Design documentation helps with communication and coordination between designers and other domain experts and stakeholders. Proper design documentation also preserves and protects corporate design knowledge and makes it available for future design problems and projects. This paper presents the implementation of an add-in for Revit that features the concepts of so-called Explanation Tags and Design Episodes to digitally explain and document design rationale and decisions, and ultimately capture the tacit design knowledge. As an extra feature, the add-in also enables the export of design episodes to a Graph-Database (Neo4j) as well as CSV files for future reference and use. Subsequently, the goal is to search and query inside the graph database for similar designs that can solve and answer the new design tasks in the future. This paper contributes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, namely SDG 9 & SDG 11 among others.