Design process communication methodology

Building project design teams struggle to (1) collaborate around processes within projects, (2) share processes between projects, and (3) understand opportunities for investment in improving processes across projects. Overcoming each challenge requires effective and efficient communication of design processes. Yet, methods for communicating design processes from the design process communication research field are too cumbersome to be useful during design, and methods from the project information management research field focus only on information exchange and not process communication. To address these limitations, I aggregate findings from organizational science, human computer interaction, and process modeling fields to develop the characteristics of the Design Process Communication Methodology (DPCM). DPCM is Computable, Embedded, Modular, Personalized, Scalable, Shared, Social, and Transparent. Enabling these characteristics, DPCM consists of elements which represent and contextualize processes and methods that enable designers to capture and retrieve processes. To test DPCM, I map the elements and method s to the Process Integration Platform (PIP). PIP is a web tool that enables project teams to organize and share files as nodes in an information dependency map that emerges as the team works. Results from the use of PIP in student design charrettes and class projects provide evidence for the power of DPCM to effectively and efficiently communicate building design processes within project teams, between project teams, and across project teams. I claim DPCM as a contribution to the fields of design process management and project information management. DPCM lays the foundation for commercial software that shifts focus away from incremental and fragmented process improvement toward a platform that nurtures emergence of (1) improved multi-disciplinary collaboration, (2) process knowledge sharing, and (3) innovation-enabling understanding of existing processes.