Construction knowledge transfer through interactive visualization

Abstract

Changing population demographics and infrastructure demands are having a significant impact on the average level of worker expertise in the North American construction sector. Experienced employees with specialized knowledge are leaving the workforce, and their replacements are required to install and maintain a broader variety of complex systems. Because of this, it is imperative that construction knowledge be quickly and effectively transferred to practitioners through educational processes. However, recent history has demonstrated that traditional techniques may not be effective at transferring sufficient knowledge to eliminate many common mistakes. It has been suggested that new forms of knowledge transfer may be more effective and result in fewer construction errors, especially those which result from installing components out of sequence. In this paper, the authors describe efforts to adapt a traditional paper-based best practice guide into an interactive 3-D tool that can be used on a variety of devices, from laptop computers to commercially available entertainment systems. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.