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Physical and Digital Artifact-Mediated Coordination in Building Design

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Abstract

We conducted an ethnographic field study examining how a building design team used representational artifacts to coordinate the design of building systems, structure, and architecture. The goals of this study were to characterize the different interactions meeting participants had with design artifacts, to identify bottlenecks in the design coordination process, and to develop design considerations for CSCW technology that will support in-person design coordination meetings of building design teams. We found that gesturing, navigation, annotation, and viewing were the four primary interactions meeting participants had with design artifacts. The form of the design information (2D vs. 3D, digital vs. physical) had minimal impact on gesture interactions, although navigation varied significantly with different representations of design information. Bottlenecks in the design process were observed when meeting participants attempted to navigate digital information, interact with wall displays, and access information individually and as a group. Based on our observations, we present some possible directions for future CSCW technologies, including new mechanisms for digital bookmarking, interacting with 2D and 3D design artifacts simultaneously, and enriched pointing techniques and pen functionality.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their in-depth comments and detailed suggestions that substantially improved this paper, and our field study participants for their enthusiastic participation. We also thank Tony Tang for reviewing several drafts of this document, Sara Bly, Maureen Stone, and Karen Parker for their suggestions and comments, Mani Golparvar Fard for his help with data collection, and Lu Yu and Brandon Walker for their contributions to video coding. This work was funded by the New Opportunities program of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Strategic Grants Program of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055, STN CSC, Victoria, BC, V8W 3P6, Canada

    Melanie Tory & Fuqu Wu

  2. Department of Civil Engineering, University of British Columbia, 6250 Applied Science Lane, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Sheryl Staub-French

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, 201-2366 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Barry A. Po

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  1. Melanie Tory
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Tory, M., Staub-French, S., Po, B.A. et al. Physical and Digital Artifact-Mediated Coordination in Building Design. Comput Supported Coop Work 17, 311–351 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-008-9077-4

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