Managing and communicating information on the stanford living laboratory feasibility study

AEC projects require multidisciplinary solutions. Today AEC professionals have formal methods to help them manage and communicate much of a single discipline's information; however, they lack formal methodologies to manage and communicate information and processes among multiple disciplines. As a result, AEC projects have difficulty quickly and accurately achieving their many objectives. We are designing and implementing three methodologies to help AEC professionals overcome these difficulties. Using our POP methodology AEC professionals can organize information models in terms of the functions, forms, and behaviors of the design products, organizations and processes. Using our Narrative methodology they can communicate and manage the integration of design processes by defining and controlling the dependencies between information models. Using our Decision Dashboard methodology, they can consider tradeoffs amongst options and document decisions. In this paper we present our application of these methods to case studies from the feasibility study of a "Living Laboratory" currently being designed at Stanford University. We discuss how these methodologies might enable AEC professionals to better manage and communicate their multidisciplinary design processes and information, and describe ongoing efforts to develop integrated software prototypes for these methodologies in an interactive workspace.