Human-computer interaction's role in geographical information systems development

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informátca e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Development of a BIM-enabled software tool for facility management using interactive floor plans, graph-based data management and granular information retrieval

Since its very conception Building Information Modeling incorporates the notion of using digital models—rich in geometric and semantic information—throughout the whole life cycle of a building. The creation of these models is a process tied to much effort, split by disciplines ,executed by different parties and brought together under difficult collaboration. However, in reality the effective utilization of the BIM process ends with the conclusion of the construction project. The subsequent Operation & Management phase makes little to no use of the information contained in these files, although it would be valuable resource to boost productivity. Especially the Facility Management phase, suffers from great inefficiency caused by challenges of data management and outside advances in digitization. Research suggests thatBIM is able to provide benefits for processes in FM and O&M related tasks and increase their overall efficiency, but previous attempts to introduce BIM software have remained fruitless.We argue that current solutions have failed to meet expectations and requirements by FM community, which generally lack expertise in working with CAD-like software. Instead this thesis presents a concept which puts interactive, two-dimensional floor plans at the center of a possible BIM-enabled Facility Management (FM) software tool. These floor plans are directly derived from BIM models and maintain linkage to all relevant semantic data, which is stored in a graph database. Users are able to navigate rooms, equipment and themselves on the floor plans. Further information about rooms can be accessed through 360◦photospheres—enabling remote exploration and conception—and room specific 3D model. The latter is generated beforehand and follows the underlying concept that FM seldomly requires a holistic view of the whole building but instead a cross section of many different domain models, tied by a specific location. Based on the mentioned features and concepts a prototypical web application is developed in order to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solution

Personification as a design strategy in visual communication

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-89).When we encounter statistics too far removed from our personal experience, we sometimes find it difficult to imagine the real implications of that data. While we might understand the information logically, it can be hard to relate it to our immediate personal lives. In this thesis, I investigate a novel visual representation for such data, which I call Personification of Information. This alternative form of data visualization incorporates real people within the viewer's immediate physical or social environment as part of the representation. The goal of this visualization technique is to bring information that is otherwise perceived as distant and detached closer to the viewer. This design strategy is explored in three artistic projects, "What If the World were your n Facebook friends?", "Unification-A Case Study?" And "What Was the Media Lab Thinking About In The Year _ _ _ ?" They are complemented by two projects from other areas that investigate Personification as a design strategy to bring the abstract closer to the individual: "Omnivisu" uses Personification as an interface to architecture; "Giving Character to Characters" applies the strategy to augment digital typography with human expression. Additionally I formalize the findings of these projects as a set of generalized design parameters for Personification of Information.by Richard The.S.M