Designing a novel virtual collaborative environment to support collaboration in design review meetings

Project review meetings are part of the project management process and are organised to assess progress and resolve any design conflicts to avoid delays in construction. One of the key challenges during a project review meeting is to bring the stakeholders together and use this time effectively to address design issues as quickly as possible. At present, current technology solutions based on BIM or CAD are information-centric and do not allow project teams to collectively explore the design from a range of perspectives and brainstorm ideas when design conflicts are encountered. This paper presents a system architecture that can be used to support multi-functional team collaboration more effectively during such design review meetings. The proposed architecture illustrates how information-centric BIM or CAD systems can be made human- and team-centric to enhance team communication and problem solving. An implementation of the proposed system architecture has been tested for its utility, likability and usefulness during design review meetings. The evaluation results suggest that the collaboration platform has the potential to enhance collaboration among multi-functional teams

Education and Museum: Cultural Heritage and learning

Project description supported by Erasmus Plus KA2- The project proposal is connected to the promotion of initiatives, starting in primary school, for using ICT, the open educational resources and digital resources of cultural heritage for the improvement science learning. The experience and result

Individual and collective success: the social dynamics of multidisciplinary design teamwork

Effective team working across disciplines is essential to solve the technological and managerial problems associated with construction projects. However, while it is widely accepted that this method of working is critical to the achievement organisational goals, it is a poorly understood process. Generic best practice recipes on how to improve team work in collaborative projects appears to have had limited impact on performance. Unless the realities of implementing and managing such joint endeavours are conceptualised and articulated in a manner that reflects the actual processes and patterns of behaviour, multi-disciplinary team working will remain a poorly understood working model. The goal of this work was to develop a conceptual framework that visualises the real success factors of multi-disciplinary working so that practitioners can apply a new understanding of predictable processes and patterns of behaviours to improve collaborative project outcomes. To achieve this, the project started with an exploration of critical success factors in multi-disciplinary design projects, encompassing extensive interviewing, workshops and a survey followed by a grounded theory (GT) study of collaborative working in six multi-disciplinary design projects. The switch to GT methodology offered possibilities to further probe into the dynamics of multi-disciplinary team working from the perspective of the team members. The findings show that team working in multi-disciplinary design projects can be explained through the social process of informalising. Informalising refers to the strategies practitioners use to cope with the multiple pressures and unforeseen demands that pervade the collaborative design environments. It portrays the relevance of managing of expectations and value-judging to remain effective and efficient in the face of change and uncertainty. These are critical factors that influence the project trajectory and experience of those involved. Alongside these results the work also demonstrates the importance of so called super soft factors such as shared values, creativity and innovation and passion and enthusiasm to achieve positive project outcomes. Overall, recognising that the process of informalising forms an essential part of cultivating collaboration, and hence getting the work done, more attention should be given to understand such activity in today s turbulent and transient project organisations. Knowledge and understanding of this form of emergent and improvisational strategy may enable managers to predict and control patterns of behaviour inherent in the management of collaborative design projects, and positively influence project outcomes in terms of perceived value and profit

Accounting historians engaging with scholars inside and outside accounting: issues, opportunities and obstacles

Originating in a panel presentation at the eighth Accounting History International Conference, this study offers a reflection on the issues, opportunities and obstacles which may arise when accounting historians engage with other accounting scholars and scholars outside of accounting. Supporting the view that accounting scholars need and should make an effort to engage with other scholars inside and outside accounting, various aspects are considered as enhancing the interdisciplinarity of accounting history research. Then, issues such as researchers and the community, research problems, theories, methods and data are addressed. The opportunities arising from interdisciplinary interactions with a wide range of scholars are then developed. Finally, the potential obstacles are addressed. These obstacles can be overcome by the development of robust communication and the invention of a new genre of discourse and research focus and by working with those outside our discipline and embracing the challenge of the new and the different

Self-Management and Team-Making in Cross-Functional Work Teams: Discovering the Keys to Becoming an Integrated Team

Project teams are rapidly becoming the primary mechanisms for innovation and change in modern organizations. As such, they are designed to capitalize on leadership and integrated cross-functional teamwork and to negate subordination and individual gamesmanship. Unfortunately, research on cross-functional project teams is scarce and largely atheoretical. The increasing use of these project teams by modern organizations, however, calls for theory development in this area. In the present paper, self-management and team-making models are applied to cross-functional project designs to develop a theoretical framework for the investigation of teamwork effectiveness for integrated cross-functional project teams. Future issues for theory development and research methodology are presented

Analysis of Emerging Reputation and Funding Mechanisms in the Context of Open Science 2.0

This report covers the outcomes of two studies funded by JRC IPTS to explore emerging drivers for Open Science 2.0. In general, Open Science 2.0 is associated with themes such as open access to scientific outputs, open data, citizen science and open peer evaluation systems. This study, however, focused on less explored themes, namely on alternative funding mechanisms for scientific research and on emerging reputation mechanisms for scholars resulting from Web 2.0 platforms and applications. It has been demonstrated that both are providing significant new opportunities for researchers to disseminate, share, explore and collaborate with other researchers, but it remains to be seen whether they will be able to bring about more disruptive change in how science and research systems function in the future. They could well do so, especially if related changes being considered by the European Commission on ‘Science 2.0: Science in Transition’ are taken into account.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

MDO and Cross-Disciplinary Practice in R&D: A Portrait of Principles and Current Practice

For several decades, Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) has served an important role in aerospace engineering by incorporating physics based disciplinary models into integrated system or sub-system models for use in research, development, (R&D) and design. This paper examines MDO's role in facilitating the integration of the researchers from different single disciplines during R&D and early design of large-scale complex engineered systems (LaCES) such as aerospace systems. The findings in this paper are summarized from a larger study on interdisciplinary practices and perspectives that included considerable empirical data from surveys, interviews, and ethnography. The synthesized findings were derived by integrating the data with theories from organization science and engineering. The over-arching finding is that issues related to cognition, organization, and social interrelations mostly dominate interactions across disciplines. Engineering issues, such as the integration of hardware or physics-based models, are not as significant. Correspondingly, the data showed that MDO is not the primary integrator of researchers working across disciplines during R&D and early design of LaCES. Cognitive focus such as analysis versus design, organizational challenges such as incentives, and social opportunities such as personal networks often drove the human interactive practices among researchers from different disciplines. Facilitation of the inherent confusion, argument, and learning in crossdisciplinary research was identified as one of several needed elements of enabling successful research across disciplines