LiveCol workshop brought together a number of experts

The third LiveCol workshop on information management in building design projects took place at Afry’s office in Espoo in September 2024. The primary goal of the workshop was to collect observations on the existing information management and design processes in building design projects. The workshop featured industry professionals presenting the current methods for managing, creating, and disseminating information. Presentations were delivered by experts in structural engineering, HVAC engineering, and BIM coordination.

While the professionals were presenting, other workshop participants took notes and wrote down their observations. A total of 110 notes were collected and the notes were categorized by assigning tags that matched their content, allowing for multiple tags to be applied to a single note. Similar tags were merged, resulting in a total of 49 distinct tags.

A network graph was constructed from the notes and tags, with nodes representing each note and tag, and edges connecting each note to its corresponding tags. The network was then partitioned to communities using the so-called Leiden algorithm. The quality of the partitioned communities was measured using the modularity of a single community. Communities with higher contribution are more likely to have higher internal connectivity and are more cohesive. Contribution values were normalized using unity-based normalization, and the communities were categorized into Low (< 0.33), Moderate (0.33 – 0.66) and High (> 0.66) contribution category based on normalized values. A total of 19 communities was found, of which nine (groups 11 – 19) got normalized contribution value of less than 0.05, and are separated from the main network, as we can clearly see from the figure 1.

Figure 1: The network forms clearly partitioned communities

Three main groups (groups 1–3) clearly stood out from the network, revealing themes of federated BIM, information management, and collaboration. When examining the topics of these main groups, an overarching theme emerges: technology-based collaboration.

The themes emerging from five moderate-impact groups (groups 4–8) include initial data, software, expertise, decision-making, and preliminary design. A shared overarching theme for these groups is information processing and design processes.

Groups 9 and 10 had low normalized modularity (< 0.2), revealing themes of information sources and data. Groups with low modularity do not have a common overarching theme, as they mainly consist of individual observations without shared tags with other observations.

The emerging themes from the workshop provide the LiveCol -project with a solid foundation to deepen understanding of the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of real-time collaboration in building design. Technology-based collaboration encompasses methods and tools, such as federated BIM and common data environment, which support interaction within design teams and improve information accessibility. Reducing information latency and bringing processes closer to real-time enables faster decision-making and reduces the risk of design conflicts.

The theme of information processing and design processes highlights key stages in which initial data, software, and expertise merge in preliminary design. Based on the observations in this group, design processes can be developed to leverage the opportunities of real-time collaboration, allowing seamless information flow between parties in the design process.

In upcoming LiveCol project workshops, a deeper exploration will focus on how to integrate these themes into building design practices and processes to support real-time decision-making and promote project efficiency and quality outcomes.