We are developing an information environment for the Swiss building industry, to provide a common technical platform for information, communication, and collaboration between all partners in the building planning, design, construction, and management processes. Our objective is to augment the partners' current computing environment with support for information sharing and collaboration, in support of existing work practices and concurrent to existing applications. Visualizations of the information structures that result from the collaborative activities empower the partners in an analysis and understanding of these processes and, consequently, increase effectiveness during collaboration. When requirements are specified as constraints or mathematical formulas over continuous variables, computational tools approximate the space of potential solutions, providing means to detect conflicts and guide negotiation.

A Web-based Information, Communication, and Collaboration (ICC; Stouffs, forthcoming) environment allows to manage and present distributed, related data generated and exchanged in the context of a collaborative building project. It serves as a framework for the development and dissemination of tools that can serve both a single partner and the entire collaborative team. It is founded on an information architecture that has the following characteristics: information entities provide the resources for all activities, a project organization assists in managing these entities, authoring information attributes credits and assigns responsibilities, and relationships embed the collaborative structure. Together, these provide for a powerful representation, from which visualizations illustrate many aspects of the collaborative processes. This environment has been extended with tools to manage decision-making and elicit discussions, to generate project reports and manage their distribution, and to dynamically visualize the information structures.

As further support for collaboration tasks during design, solution spaces are proposed instead of single solutions only. Partners involved in today's construction projects typically assign single values for sub-sets of design parameters and then proceed, often after tedious negotiations with other partners, to integrate these partial solutions into more complete project descriptions. We suggest the use of constraints to express possibly large families of acceptable solutions in order to facilitate and abbreviate the negotiation process. Constraint satisfaction algorithms have been developed for approximating solution spaces and detecting conflicts in non-linear systems of inequalities on continuous variables. SpaceSolver is an Internet based collaboration platform integrated into the ICC environment (Lottaz, 1999). SpaceSolver demonstrates the usefulness of such techniques when implementing least commitment decision strategies, when making decisions during negotiation, and when changes in the project's context occur.

Our spatial modeling program Sculptor has been extended to cover the synchronous aspects of collaboration in this project (Kurmann, 1998). It enables the simultaneous collaborative modeling and designing in three dimensions on a single model and in a distributed environment. A Web-based monitoring site manages all active collaborative sessions and allows everybody to view the sessions, look at current models, and start a new or join an existing modeling session.

Communication and collaboration is often hampered by the existence of different data formats and representations. We have developed a representational formalism, denoted sorts, that allows one to define, compare, and relate different representations (Stouffs and Krishnamurti, 1997). Sorts do not specify a fixed frame of reference, the concept of sorts only defines a common syntax, providing the means to develop translational facilities between alternative representations. There is no imposition of concepts beyond the purely syntactical.

The project results are being tested and evaluated both in-house and independently by some of the project's industry partners. The research team uses the ICC environment for information management and publishing within the context of this research project, and evaluates both SpaceSolver and the environment on realistic examples supplied by an industry partner. Independent evaluation of the ICC environment is provided for in an educational and design collaboration involving different universities, by an IT partner in its use as a multi-project information environment, and by a building-engineering partner to support the management of a construction project. Sculptor has demonstrated its strengths in collaborative design in a number of virtual design studios held simultaneously at different universities around the world.