Web-based communication platform for decision making in early design phases

During the early phases of building design, the architects create many variants and make important decisions about different design aspects and details mostly based on their own experience and know-how. In order to reduce the risks brought by arbitrary decisions, a lot of effort was put into developing simulation tools. However, most of these simulation tools require more elaborate details as what is available during these early phases, or they will provide some cumbersome results via oversimplification. Therefore, it is equally important to develop a communication tool enabling the earlier integration of suggestions given by diverse domain experts. Hence, a research based on the concept of adaptive detailing has been made by Zahedi and Petzold since 2018, according to which those suggestions and feedback provided by multiple domain-experts could be documented using a minimized machine-readable communication protocol based on BIM [1]. Consequently, an online platform for supporting the collaborative work through adaptive detailing at early stage of design is developed in this paper. This paper focuses on the Optimization of workflow and effectiveness of user interface in this platform. As evaluation of this platform, a user-study was carried out among students and practitioners in AEC industry. The result of user-study not only practically verifies the usefulness of this tool, but also implies the difficulty in transforming the daily communication mode into digital platform.