Communicating, integrating and improving multidisciplinary design Narratives

Abstract

AEC professionals commonly use discipline-specific computer-based information modeling and analysis processes today. However, these professionals lack simple, flexible, formal frameworks to communicate and integrate these processes and information amongst multiple disciplines. They therefore struggle to quickly and accurately achieve balanced and near-optimal multidisciplinary designs. Narratives are formal, visual descriptions of the design process that include representations, reasoning, and their interrelationships. This paper presents several conceptual and implemented Narratives, and discusses how they can help AEC professionals better communicate and integrate their design processes and information and thus potentially improve their designs. © 2006 Springer.