NEW E-LEARNING TOOL TO IMPROVE COLLABORATIVE DESIGN

Building is one of the most widespread human activities, as it involves a far greater number of people and professional profiles than all other industries and absorbs about half of world energy consumption. The design-construction process has a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature that makes the building product, increasingly complex. In the faculties of Architecture and Engineering where students learn Urban Planning and Building Design, it is a hard work to deal with so many scientific disciplines and to understand their mutual problematic (and often hidden) relations. A generally agreed solution is an efficient collaboration among the designers. The great potentialities of the new media are considered to be crucial for the resolution of the previously mentioned problem, although, until now, such means have been raising new problems instead of solving it. To provide an efficient collaboration among all the designers involved in the design process, this paper presents a model of the structure of the building design process, based on the Collaborative Work Environment paradigm, that allows to define a system supporting integrated building design. Its structure relies on the dialectics among distributed Knowledge Bases and a Shared (and agreed) one. Students are supported by Intelligent Assistants. The system semantically translates the information exchanged (both formally and informally) among the students, allows incoherent/favourable situations to be highlighted and managed in real time, and may facilitate the onset and dissemination of creative ideas. The system implementation has been made as a game, in order not to be too complex but in the meantime not to lose generality, and to use it as an e-learning tool. This tool can have educational and social outcomes: as an e-learning tool, a ‘game’, that can assist university students to allow them exploring design solution, acquiring knowledge, being aware of design constraints. The ‘game’ can be easily applied to other educational fields; as a general promotion tool of knowledge among professionals and workers, by the spreading of e-learning tools in industry, school, services’ society.