CoKAAD: a Framework for Collaborative Architectural Design

Architectural Design, as in many other contexts, requires contribution from several experts, each with his/her own knowledge, experience, tools, and a source of possible problems, constraints, and suggestions. A collaborative approach consists in creating an opportunity for each expert to provide a contribution to the design process. In particular, in the early stages of the design process, most decisions with high impact are stated without developing a representation of the project within a standard model with unambiguous language: this would require details and time not available in those phases. Henceforth, there is a little space for provide individual contribution (constraints and/or suggestions) of various experts and compare these in those crucial stages. Such a collaboration would be fostered by adopting: (i) suitable models, with a simple but formal semantics, with the required flexibility for manipulating both data and metadata, and (ii) environments, based on this models, that allow the various experts to “plug-in” their own tools and knowledge, and provide their contribution since the very first stages of the project. Such an framework would provide a powerful environment to teach and learn what is notoriously hard to convoy in books, and even in lectures, that is good design methodologies and practices.