Damien Hanser

User Adaptive Visualization of Cooperative Architectural Design

A cooperative design is a social activity inside a group. In this kind of activity, each actor plays a specific role. If each actor wants to realize the actions corresponding to his role, he needs some adaptive information about the cooperation context. The cooperation context of design project is a relational organization where each actor maintains specific relations with other people (designers, project managers, etc.) but also with documents and activities. Such a cooperation context exists in architectural cooperative design which is distinguished by a “mutual prescription” between actors. In architectural design we are in a network model of actors, instead of the hierarchical model that we can find in classical workflow tools. This organization has to be represented in the project management tool to give each user an adaptive vision of the project organization and evolution. The representation and the visualization of such a network, which characterizes each project, is the main objective of the “Relational Model of Cooperation” and the hypermedia view presented in this paper.

BIM-Agile Practices Experiments in Architectural Design

The digital transition is changing the way architectural firms are making design. The BIM technology, which tends to become mandatory for legal and competitive reasons is both convincing because of its parametric and global modeling sides and frightening because of changes caused by the arrival of new digital tools. Indeed, our basic postulate is that the emergence of new digital tools must necessarily be followed by the emergence of new practices and new project management in design stage.

Towards contextual visualization of collaborative design

A design project is a professional and social activity inside a group of actors which belongs to the same or a different organisation. In this context, the decision-making power is distributed inside the group. This a network model of actors instead of a hierarchical model as we find in classical worflow tools. This organisation has to be represented in the project management tool to give each user the realistic vision of the project organisation. We propose to use a hyperdocument representation and a graphical network visualisation of the project organisation and evolution. The project visualisation is then a graph of information displaying the context of the cooperation.

Towards a BIM-Agile Method in Architectural Design Assessment of a Pedagogical Experiment

This paper describes a scientific experiment carried out in the context of the AEC in France. This research is part of the digital transition in architecture, with a particular interest in BIM technology and how to integrate it into architectural design through social sciences. Indeed, the arrival of BIM technology raises both technical and human questions. The design work is changed, the amount of work is moved upstream, but above all we see new tools, new uses, and new practices without any project management method emerging. In other fields such as industry, software engineering and HMI design, we have seen the emergence of methods that focus more on the team and the user than on the process. We find Lean, continuous improvement, or agility, a family of methods that interests us here. Our research hypothesis is that inserting agile practices alongside current business practices will integrate and exploit BIM technology and other digital innovations. To do this, we identified what the problems were with BIM technology, and selected several agile practices highlighting communication, group cohesion and customer needs identification to address them. Thus, we carry out experiments in which we test, analyze and adapt these agile practices to architectural design. This paper then describes a pedagogical experiment conducted with Master 2 students at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture of Nancy in France. In a workshop, the students had to carry out a BIM project, while they used the agile practices that we had adapted: the design matrix, the micro poker, and the stand-up meeting. In addition to these three practices, we took the opportunity to try agile overseeing using what we call a stand-up meeting. The objective is to validate the synergy of these practices while ensuring that they respond to our communication, group cohesion and customer needs integration issues. This experiment takes place over one week and will serve as a basis for us to prepare experiments in a professional context.