Supporting the knowledge management of design decision making in architecture

As highlighted by various institutional reports (Latham 1994;  Egan 1998) the UK construction industry suffers from endemic fragmentation of its business processes, resulting in low profitability and customer satisfaction. Design intentions are not recorded, people taking part in a construction design process often do not understand the needs of others equally involved in the project, data is not managed until the end of a project and lessons are rarely learnt and transferred across projects. This research aims to provide some means of improvement for construction design processes by addressing the issue of documentation, elicitation and management of project information and knowledge, together with promoting practices that foster learning and knowledge transfer across projects. A substantial section of this research was carried out as part of the EPSRC funded ADS Project. Within the ADS project a prototype of an advanced tool to capture design information was developed and tested on real architectural design projects with the collaboration of Building Design Partnership, an industrial partner of the research consortium. Moreover, pan-industry feedback was gathered on the underlying approach of the system and how appropriate it was for addressing some of the problems of the construction industry. Building on ADS and on the experience acquired in an architectural practice going through the process of developing its own knowledge management tools, the second set of tools, K-Man, was designed. ADS and K-Man, although similar in intents and functionalities, have substantially different approaches, the former being top-down and the latter being bottom-up. This shift of approach is clearly reflected in what is the most significant difference between ADS and K-man:  while ADS makes use of top down structures like taxonomies, K-man uses typically bottom up structures like recommender systems.