An Innovative Approach to Improve Collaboration in a Futuristic Design Review

The benefits of IT-based innovation and collaborative workspaces are well recognised in the construction industry to improve its productivity. Enterprises realised their need for sophisticated ICT based working environments to overcome geographical barriers separation between teams and promote social interactions providing appropriate design tools and intuitive interfaces to assess design from various perspectives. Since then, such demands became the drive for companies to adopt new forms of workspaces to promote social interaction between team members and allow efficient collaborative working. These new technologies such as networking, Virtual Reality, collaborative interfaces started influencing the way enterprises work. A futuristic scenario was developed in the course of the on-going CoSpaces European project with a vision of using new technologies to create workspaces with intuitive collaborative interfaces. The expected benefits are fewer meetings are required, with more design alternatives to discuss and better shared viewpoints among the various competencies of the meeting. This will improve communication, increase collaboration among the project teams and eventually improve the industry‟s productivity. The work does not only demonstrate the technological requirements to develop such collaborative interfaces as the CoSpaces platform for collaboration but it is further extended to evaluate the effective use of implementing this framework by a group of end users to achieve better collaborative solutions in the construction industry. The design review scenario implemented in a living lab setting, reveals the outcomes of the end users‟ experience using the human-centric technologies developed in CoSpaces project to review and solve design problems in construction.