Space-centred information management approach to improve CAD-based healthcare building design

This study focuses on developing a space-centred CAD tool to enable designers to effectively manage and implement the information of design guidance information and user requirements during design processes, especially for the stages of design briefing and conceptual design. It aims to structure and store design guidance and user requirements for healthcare building design into a relational database, and link them to relevant space entities in design plans. The tool is developed on the platform of Autodesk Architecture Desktop (ADT). It also enables users to store and retrieve pictures associated with textual information, because pictures have been always used by designers as an effective medium to represent and deliver design information and knowledge. This can give users directly visual and more understandable perceptions of the design guidance. The tool is fully embedded with Autodesk AutoCAD systems to ensure the application of this tool being fully merged with CAD-based design process. A set of design guidance about Alzheimer clinic built environments are adopted as a sample to demonstrate and validate the tool. Moreover, the scenario of expanding this application to more broad areas has also been foreseen

Learning building pathology using computers - evaluation of a prototype application

Building Surveying employers are requiring graduates with a high level of cognitive and experiential skills to enable them to survey buildings directly after graduation with little or no supervision. These skills have traditionally been built up over many years through on the job training. This has led to a change in thinking for educators as providing this type of graduate requires learning and training material that is time consuming and costly to provide, as it requires learners to be actively involved in real surveying tasks. One method that appears to solve some of these problems is computer-aided-learning (CAL). CAL can be defined as, “…a way of presenting educational material to a learner by means of computer program which gives the opportunity for individual interaction.” The full potential of CAL tools in the building-surveying domain has yet to be fully explored. This paper presents the results of a prototype application developed to enable inexperienced surveyors to learn building pathology without leaving their desktops