Characterizing interactions with BIM tools and artifacts in building design coordination meetings

Design coordination and conflict detection with BIM are one of the most frequent and valued uses of BIM in the construction sector. However, our observations of design coordination meetings indicate that even when BIM tools are readily available, practitioners frequently revert back to 2D digital and paper-based drawings and rarely interact with BIM tools on their own without the help of a BIM Coordinator. To better understand the challenges of interacting with BIM, we conducted a long term ethnographic study of a project team performing design coordination using state of the art BIM tools. We developed a taxonomy to represent the relationships between goals, artifacts, interactions and transitions for BIM-based design coordination processes. This research extends this prior work by analyzing the frequency of interactions with different design artifacts, characterizing interactions with state of the art BIM tools, and identifying the motivation behind interactions with design artifacts. An important contribution of this research is the identification and characterization of the transitions participants had between design artifacts and views, which has previously not been studied in depth. We identified four major interactions with design artifacts, including preparation, annotation, navigation, and recording. We identified six categories of goals for interacting with design artifacts, including prepare, grab attention, visualize, inspect, document, and query. We discuss our findings and provide possible design considerations to address the challenges we observed.