Engaging with BIM: Interactive workspaces in facility design and construction

With greater demand for high performance buildings and more specialized expertise within design and construction professionals, there is an increase in demand for new methods to support collaboration. One collaborative technology is building information modeling (BIM), to generate and share content across disciplines and organizations, supporting the conveyance of building design and construction information. BIM by itself is not enough to engage participants in collaborative practices. Interactive workspaces, technology, and media-enabled collocated spaces, can be used by project teams to leverage this digital content associated with a project design. These facilities can support large-scale visualization of models, multi-modal interaction, and aid collaboration of team members. This paper presents a survey of interactive workspaces currently used by architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry teams, and their relative use cases in the design and delivery process. Facilities were identified and documented via a content search in literature and publicly available resources. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with interactive workspace owners/managers to understand the feature sets and use cases of these facilities in more detail. Current use cases, as well as the similarities and differences in feature sets for interactive workspaces used in the AEC industry, are documented. This research presents three categories of feature sets: physical features, application features, and interactive and immersive features. The results document the variety of interactive workspace use cases and provide a deeper understanding of their role in the AEC Industry.