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PREFACE:

While still an undergraduate student in my native country, Brazil, I interned for a construction company and performed rudimentary paper-based design coordination. 

I compared drawings that were submitted by various specialty engineering firms, each working independently on their scopes of work and not collaborating with one another.

 My job was seemingly simple: to identify physical conflicts between the various scopes of work based on two-dimensional drawings. I performed the comparison as systematically as possible but did not even have a light table to help. 

I simply had the hard-copy drawings opened up side-by-side on a large meeting table. Often, the drawings that I was comparing, all from different design firms, were not even printed on the same scale. So that seemingly simple task became a geometric nightmare, with design intent often lost in translation. 

That resulted in numerous field-detected issues, which was simply viewed as business as usual. Luckily, this was a high-rise residential tower, in which each floor was identical to all the others.

 Hence, once the issues were detected and documented on the first floor, all other 24 floors benefitted from those lessons. The first floor, in this case, served as a prototype for the rest of the tower. A physical, real-world, expensive prototype.

It is worth noting that the Brazilian building construction market differs significantly from the United States one. In Brazil, the construction entity is typically the ownerdeveloper, leading to less fragmentation, at least from the construction side. However, from a design perspective, it is similarly fragmented. 

That fragmentation and this early internship experience is where my curiosity related to design coordination began. Years later, while pursuing my Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, I began working with building information modeling (BIM) and had the opportunity to experience BIM being implemented on a campus project for the first time, in a large new building. This was in the early days of BIM, in the mid-2000s.

 I was charged by the general contractor (GC), who was also new to BIM, with figuring out ways to leverage BIM in the project. One of the opportunities turned out to be design coordination.

 The idea came about when I showed up for a design coordination meeting early morning in the middle of a Pittsburgh winter. In attendance were the GC’s project manager, an owner’s representative, a couple of members of the design team from out of state, as well as heating, plumbing, fire safety, electrical, and sheet metal subcontractors.

 That was the kickoff meeting It is worth noting that the Brazilian building construction market differs significantly from the United States one. In Brazil, the construction entity is typically the ownerdeveloper, leading to less fragmentation, at least from the construction side.

 However, from a design perspective, it is similarly fragmented. That fragmentation and this early internship experience is where my curiosity related to design coordination began. Years later, while pursuing my Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, I began working with building information modeling (BIM) and had the opportunity to experience BIM being implemented on a campus project for the first time, in a large new building. This was in the early days of BIM, in the mid-2000s.

 I was charged by the general contractor (GC), who was also new to BIM, with figuring out ways to leverage BIM in the project. One of the opportunities turned out to be design coordination. The idea came about when I showed up for a design coordination meeting early morning in the middle of a Pittsburgh winter.

 In attendance were the GC’s project manager, an owner’s representative, a couple of members of the design team from out of state, as well as heating, plumbing, fire safety, electrical, and sheet metal subcontractors.

 That was the kickoff meeting We suggested that the subcontractors leverage that BIM model and use it as a starting point for design coordination. The subcontractors in the room strongly pushed back, arguing that the use of BIM or 3D was not in their contract and most of them did not have in-house capability to develop fabrication drawings in 3D (although some already designed in 3D, but reduced their submittals to the contractually established 2D drawings). 

They also argued that “we’ve always done it this way and the projects turned out just fine.” Given the contract argument and seeing that we were not getting buy-in, we decided to carry on with the design coordination in the traditional process, overlaying 2D drawings on a light table. 

At the same time, I realized that would give me a unique opportunity of collecting ground truth data for my own research. Hence, I attended many months of these 2D design coordination sessions for this project, meticulously collecting data on which pairs of trades were coordinating each day, which area of the project they were coordinating for, which clashes they were finding, and what sorts of questions were they asking each other during the coordination process.