Cross-disciplinary AEC teamwork supported by re-representation

This paper studies the relation between activities, media and communication channels, and rerepresentation of AEC concepts in support of common ground building in cross-disciplinary, geographically distributed teams. AEC project team members determine the role of discipline-specific knowledge in a cross-disciplinary project-based environment. It is through cross-disciplinary interaction that the team becomes a community of practitioners. It is critical that team members build an awareness, appreciation, and understanding of the other disciplines. Our hypotheses are: Significant sources of information behind decisions and request for actions are embedded within the dialogue in which participants use both informal and formal media to express their ideas. These communicative events represent the thought process towards decisions are not captured. Capturing this information supports common ground building and accelerates execution of action requests. Re-representations of concepts mediate and accelerate common ground building. Systematic use of intra or inter disciplinary re-representations as part of the team work practice correlate with high team performance, i.e., effective team process and high product quality. The central theoretical point of departure for this study is communication theory, in addition to learning theory and distributed cognition, design theory and methodology, and knowledge management. Communication is central to teamwork. The objective is to ensure that what was said by one member was understood by all the other members. In communication theory this is defined as the process of grounding, or common ground building (Clark and Brennan, 1991). It refers to the development of mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions that is critical for communication between people. To build common ground the dialogue needs to have both the presentation phase and the acceptance phase (i.e., acknowledgement that what was said was understood). Clark and Brennan studied conversation dynamics and offer in common ground theory an instance relevant to our study, called grounding references. One of the techniques to achieve grounding references is through alternative descriptions. Our study builds on these concepts to analyze multimodal and multimedia communicative events in cross-disciplinary, geographically distributed teams. Similar to the alternative descriptions technique defined by grounding theory and used in conversation dynamics analysis (Clark and Brennan, 1991), we identified the re-representation technique used by team members in multimodal and multimedia communicative events in crossdisciplinary, geographically distributed teams. In the context of our study we define re-representation as a sequence of representations of the same concept using different communication channels (e.g., speech, gesture, sketch) and media (annotation, diagram, drawing, 3D CAD, video) for diverse activities (e.g., explanation, problem solving, etc.). Re-representations determine the breadth and depth of the design process. Re-representations are used in intraor inter-disciplinary communication. Cross-disciplinary AEC teamwork supported by re-representation