6.3 Suspended Ceiling Design Process - Bilkent University

1. INTRODUCTION
The Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry is one of the
multidisciplinary domains in which collaboration among related parties is of
utmost importance. While the knowledge needed for building processes is
distributed among the different participants from diverse disciplinary
backgrounds, the product of their activities, i.e. the building itself, is (or
should be) highly integrated. Thus, collaboration manifests itself as an
important component of project success. In a survey of AEC companies in
the U.S., collaboration among parties ranked first among the many factors
that affect quality in design phase (Arditi and Günaydın, 1998).
This dissertation addresses the problem of collaboration from an
information flow perspective. The collaborative building design process is
viewed as a series of interdependent decisions of different design
professionals and it is presupposed that like other processes, it is possible
and useful to build quantifiable models of building design. In this
introductory chapter, the research problems and the objectives of the study
are discussed and the structure of the dissertation is briefly outlined.
1.1 Problem Statement
The increasing complexity of buildings and a very competitive market place
have been forcing design professionals to improve their processes in terms
of time and quality. However, systematic design planning is not considered
1