Evolutionary and customer-oriented building design process

The management and control of the evolution of the building design process is mainly reliant on a project manager's experience and intuition, without a comprehensive and analytical appreciation of its inner workings. Moreover, most process development methods in building design lack a mechanism of directly addressing the customer's satisfaction. More recently there has been a growing understanding of the importance of effective design planning and management to overall project performance, and hence ensure the smooth running of a project within the time schedule and the budget. Furthermore, the current shift in industry thinking towards the value of a construction product to all stakeholders requires an alignment of each element of the design and construction process to the requirements of customers. A Staged Evolving Analysis Technique (SEAT) has been developed in this research, comprising two hierarchically structured design product models and two information flow-based design process models to cover conceptual and scheme design stages. [Continues.]