Technologies Developed at P⁵BL

"My philosophy is not to predict future or follow others to predict future but to build the future."

"I don't think we have a problem to keep abreast with technology. We actually invent the technology." Said Renate.

She emphasized that it is very important for the PBL research team to invent technology that is pedagogically sound and well integrated with the needs of AEC Global Teamwork Program.

Three of the software that are currently under development at PBL are:
CoMem^TM
ThinkTank^TM
RECALL^TM

CoMem^TM (Corporate Memory)
Designers: Renate Fruchter, Peter Demian (Ph.D. candidate, Stanford University)

CoMem (Corporate Memory) is a system that supports the finding of reusable designs and the understanding of these designs in context.

Reusing knowledge in architecture, engineering, and construction firms can lead to greater competitive advantage, improved designs, and more effective management of constructed facilities. Design knowledge reuse is defined as the reuse of previously designed buildings, building subsystems, or building components, as well as the knowledge and expertise ingrained in these previous designs.

Problem: Design knowledge reuse from a corporate archive of previous designs often fails, since knowledge is not captured, it is captured out of context, or there are no mechanisms for finding and retrieving reusable knowledge.

Design Methodology: The development of CoMem is guided by an iterative process of empirical observation and scenario-based interaction design. From observations of designers reusing designs from their personal memories, three key activities in the reuse process are identified:
· Finding reusable items
· Exploring the project context of each item, in order to understand it
· Exploring the evolution history of each item, in order to understand it

CoMem supports these activities through three modules: the overview of the corporate memory, the project context explorer, and the evolution history explorer. Work is ongoing to design effect interaction experiences for each of these modules.

Source: by courtesy of Peter Demian

Top

ThinkTank^TM (PBL labs Discussion Forums)
Designers: Renate Fruchter, Ravi Raghu (grad student, Stanford University)

ThinkTank is a product that has evolved over several generations. It is a discussion forum for AEC teams to conduct discussion online and deposit their documents.

Design Methodology: We follow the method of rapid protoyping, i.e. we develop different functionalities and let the users play with it. After gathering their feedback, we study the value of this implementation and make constant improvements. Finally we conduct a lot of testing to ensure that the product is robust. Thus the design is users driven.

Source: by courtesy of Ravi Raghu

Top

RECALL^TM
Designers: Renate Fruchter, Yin Zhen (Ph.D. candidates, Stanford University)

Concept generation and development occur most frequently in informal media where design capture tools are the weakest. This statement has strong implications for the capture and reuse of design knowledge because conceptual design generates the majority of initial ideas and directions that guide the course of the project.

RECALL^TM is a learning and collaboration technology that facilitates transparent and cost effective capture, sharing, and reuse of knowledge in informal media, such as sketching, audio, and video.

It provides the following benefits:

• Transparent Graphical, Audio/Video indexing
• Zero overhead for production i.e., editing/indexing.
• Zero overhead for publishing web content
• Interactive and immediate access and retrieval of knowledge and
  information, i.e., sketch, audio/video on demand.

Source: by courtesy of Renate Fruchter

Top