A relational approach of cooperation in building design

The methods and models of the concurrent engineering taken from the industry domain are unsuitable for the domain of the construction, which is characterized by a singular context of cooperation. The existing groupware tools can not be directly used in the framework of the architectural conception. They require a high level of definition of procedures and exchanges, which is incompatible with the flexibility of current practices. At first, we present the particularity of the context of the building cooperation, then we illustrate through an experiment the problems put by the use of a groupware tool based on a hierarchical data organization. From this experiment, we justify the interest of building a new model of cooperation where the relational organization of the project is taken into account. The integration of this new dimension allows to propose to the user an adapted vision of the project by taking into account the role he plays inside the project

Implicit or explicit coordination of virtual teams in building design

This paper describes the conclusions of a reflection driven by a virtual team, composed of three research teams (one in computing at LORIA, one in telecommunications at France Telecom R&D, and a last one in building construction and design at CRAI) in the context of a common project. The topic of this project is the coordination of a virtual team in the context of a virtual enterprise, with experiments in the field of building construction. More precisely, our goal is to define a model of cooperative work allowing the partners of a building construction to coordinate their efforts in an efficient way.