Exploring interdisciplinary collaboration in the detailed design phase of construction projects

Abstract

The foundation for successful collaboration in the detailed design phase of construction projects is aligning the knowledge and views of designers and contractors. In such design development meetings, architects, consultants, main contractor, subcontractors, and client representatives face several challenges in moving from conceptual designs to a documented set of shop drawings. This phase represents the peak of participants' interactions including exploring and refining design solutions, explaining and reflecting on each other's ideas and concerns, and negotiating design and cost decisions. Collaboration is often presented in the literature as practices that provide the platform for successful interaction and the achieved outcomes, but with minimal concern about actual interactive processes. Theoretically, collaboration has been studied from a variety of perspectives grouped into normative and practice-based approaches that have enhanced the research field at the inter-organisational macro-level, but there is no consensus on a framework to measure collaboration empirically in the field. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the common themes describing interdisciplinary collaboration in the literature and develop a framework explaining the conceptual relationship between them. The proposed framework provides a preliminary step towards understanding the dynamic nature and stages of the interdisciplinary collaboration in the detailed design phase.