Communicating, Integrating and Improving Multidisciplinary Design and Analysis Narratives

AEC practitioners commonly use discipline-specific computer-based information modeling and analysis processes today. However, these practitioners lack simple, flexible, formal frameworks to communicate and integrate these processes and information amongst multiple disciplines. They therefore struggle to quickly and accurately achieve balanced and near-optimal multidisciplinary designs. To address these difficulties, we are designing and testing Narratives: formal, visual descriptions of the design process that include representations, reasoning, and their interrelationships. This paper presents several Narratives, and discusses how they can help AEC practitioners and students better communicate and integrate their design processes and information and thus potentially improve their designs.