1. Message from the Directors

CIFE welcomes four new members that together broaden the business base of the CIFE membership community.

CIFE celebrated its 20^th birthday, which was a joyous occasion for all.

The upcoming Summer Program meets in Helsinki, Finland, and at Stanford on September 10 - 12. We plan two and a half day sessions to learn about the integration and automation potential of VDC and outline a strategy towards implementing VDC-enabled, integrated and automated work processes, and to enable your coming with minimal disruption to busy schedules. The Helsinki session is scheduled for June 11-12, so please register now!

We announced a VDC Certificate Program at the TAC meeting. The program includes a week of VDC education activities, work on a project that use VDC for design and management, and a two-day integration experience. The first session is scheduled for June 23 – 27, so please register now!

CIFE completed a successfull Technical Advisory Committee meeting at which members reviewed recent CIFE work and selected seed projects for 2008-09.

CIFE has moved to a new building and has a new suite of iRooms. 

Following the CIFE birthday party, CIFE hosted a group of visiting Finnish visitors for a process-modeling workshop.

2. CIFE Welcomes New Members

We are delighted to welcome new member companies:

3. Summer Program

The annual CIFE Summer Program again meets two times this year: in Helsinki in June and at Stanford in September. CIFE has measurable breakthrough goals for 2015. When we announced the goals in 2002, we did not know whether there was any hope of meeting them at all, let alone by the announced date. CIFE member company work now suggests to us that they are all attainable by at least some organizations. We again are reminded of how hard it is to make adjustments in the short term and how dramatic change can overwhelm us all in a longer term. The Summer Program focuses on work now being done in support of 2015 goals and work being put in place to meet multi-disciplinary Measurable 2010 goals.

The first session in Helsinki meets June 10 – 12, with additional days hosted by TEKES making for a whole week. Space is still available - please register online immediately. The Stanford program meets September 9 – 11.

4. VDC Certificate Program

One of the measurable 2010 goals is that member organizations “Staff each project with four VDC trained engineers.” Respondents to our 2006 VDC use survey showed that CIFE member organizations had made great progress in using VDC, but they had made little progress in training staff in VDC use. Many members tell us that staff members need some education in VDC methods before they can effectively use training in tools. We have designed the Certificate Program to address your reported need for educational background. For more iinformation on this exciting new program, please see program website.

The first class starts June 23. Please sign up quickly because space is limited to twenty. Please also notice the special pricing for teams from organizations who have Member-level or higher CIFE membership.

5. Technical Advisory Committee meeting

At the request of the 2007 TAC, the TAC met this year for two days. The first day reviewed nineteen different projects done in the past few years by CIFE researches, some as TAC-funded seed projects, some as projects with Associate and Partner-level members and some independently funded. In addition, CIFE students shared seventeen posters and demonstrations.

The TAC group reviews proposed new seed projects. This year, it selected the following projects for funding:

6. CIFE celebrates its 20^th Birthday

CIFE celebrated its 20^th birthday on April 25. Please see photos. The one-day birthday celebration had a sell-out crowd from five continents that included current and former students, visitors, industrial collaborators and faculty, all of whom shared rich traditions, successes and deep personal impacts. Commenting on CIFE influence on his company, one owner remarked that “we are completely transforming and rethinking the buildings we build.”

Pleasant surprises from the birthday celebration included the impact of CIFE and VDC on the large number of attendees and the way new business models have started to building on VDC methods. Young students, recent CIFE graduates, pre-CIFE Stanford graduates and many practitioners all shared personal, amusing and touching stories of the impact of CIFE on their professional and personal lives, both publicly and in many informal conversations.  A recurring theme from the elder participants was their envy of new entrants into the AEC of today with so many VDC opportunities as well as the excitement of the new generation about their opportunities. 

There were remarks about the impact of CIFE on universities everywhere in the US and abroad, comments on the unique CIFE culture that others have tried but cannot succeed in replicating, and “wonderful contributions to industry.” Another theme was that CIFE and Stanford together enabled so many things in the lives of participants, including academic and research development, university linkages, friends, colleagues and methods. Industry participants commented on the vision of AEC that they have developed based on the leadership of CIFE and the way that CIFE ideas have energized the engineering and technology elements of both the companies and major segments of the industry. Another comment was that one company has looked at lots of technology but then concluded, “it’s all about process, and CIFE helped us see it.”

It was also gratifying to be joined by participants who are developing new business models that include tight integration of design, fabrication-assembly and asset ownership, as at Optima, new modeling model-based analysis method providers such as Gehry Technologies and Building Explorer, Inc., and new a “model escrow” service that will operate globally and support models over the project lifetime from “lust to dust” from Satellier.

7. CIFE Moved

CIFE moved to the new Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment & Energy Building, affectionately called Y2E2 on campus.  Thanks to a generous space allocation from the university and a technology gift from CIFE member SMART Technologies , we have a marvelous new laboratory and design center as well as offices and meeting rooms.

The new CIFE interactive room (iRoom) has space for about 100 in a large design session, as shown in the photo. The space can be divided into two iRooms with a flexible partition that provides visual and acoustic privacy. Each large iRoom has two adjacent small break-out rooms, all equipped with three SMART boards generously provided by SMART technologies.

8. Process Modeling Workshop

CIFE hosted a multi-day meeting with visiting researchers from Finland, including representatives from Helsinki University of Technologies' SimLab, Rautaruukki, Senate, Tekla, Tekes, Tocoman, and VTT to discuss process modeling. Finnish visitors presented some of their work. The goal was to compare BIM induced process change in Finland vs. U.S. industries, and to share results from process research.

The photo of the CIFE iroom above was taken during a multi-participant, multi-disciplinary "charrette" design session in which the Finnish participants played roles as owners and stakeholders in a design session that focused on a hypothetical problem to design three new temporary simLab rooms for the HUT campus. We used the principles of Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE) to collocate a multidisciplinary team of domain experts and to use fast technical and social integration to create very short latency between the time that a stakeholder asked a question and received an answer that was good enough to enable the design process to proceed. There was a 3D building model, which modelers manipulated parametrically to change some basic independent parameters and view changes in dependent parameters. By careful work with integration of the 3D model and some model-based analyses, the team was able to analyze energy and structural performance of about a hundred parametric design versions extremely quickly during the half-day design charrette. During the ICE session, we used the Multi-Attribute, Collaborative Design Assessment and Decision Integration (MACDADI) tool and method to identify the relevant team of decision makers, designers and stakeholders, to define and prioritize their goals, and to analyze and assess the multi stakeholder value of the different design options. We used Parametric Modeling and Process Integration and Design Optimization (PIDO) to systematically generate and assess options for their energy, structural, and cost performance. We used Social Voting of the stakeholders to assess qualitative design performance and used Sensitivity and Importance Analysis to identify parameters that drive performance.

For the charrette, we used the Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE) method developed at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and used for the past few years in CIFE teaching and research.

We at CIFE were thrilled with the results since they showed, for the first time, the promise of being able to combine substantive design discussions with detailed and meaningful engineering analysis in short design charrettes.

9. New CIFE Publications

TR172: "Framework and Case Studies Comparing Implementations and Impacts of 3D/4D Modeling Across Projects"
Ju Gao, Martin Fischer
(March 2008; 113 pages; download size: 528 KB) Downlaod
Today few project teams avail themselves of the continued and widespread use of 3D/4D modeling to the extent effective and efficient. Due to this limited practice, the implementation of 3D/4D modeling is mostly based on anecdotes from a few past projects. However, ad-hoc experiences from individual projects are not sufficient for AEC professionals to guide implementations of 3D/4D modeling. In addition, we found a number of general beliefs (p.2) about what has been learned from implementations and impacts of 3D/4D modeling. These beliefs are tacit knowledge and hence might be valid or could be wrong when AEC professionals apply them from one situation to another. Therefore, the goals of our research were to:
• develop a framework to capture, describe, and organize the characteristics of 3D/4D modeling implementations so that AEC professionals can document 3D/4D modeling experiences and compare them across projects; and
• provide researchers with a framework for cross-case pattern analysis that supports the generation of insights and guidelines.

WP108: "A Grassroots Model of Decision Support System Implementations by Construction Project Teams"
Timo Hartmann
(March 2008; 173 pages; download size: 2595 KB) Download
This thesis explains grassroots implementations of decision support systems by project teams - implementations driven by the members of a project team working at the operational level - from the perspectives of the three main stakeholders that are involved in managing the life-cycle of a decision support system: project team members, technology managers of project-based companies, and developers of decision support systems.
Using ethnographic data from a large infrastructure construction project in New York City the thesis shows that the project team on this project was only able to use a decision support system efficiently when the members of the project team were driving the decision support system implementation in a grassroots process. The project team members mutually structurated the technology and their knowledge throughout the grassroots implementation. They influenced the technical reality of the decision support system while at the same time being influenced by the technical reality of the system.
Existing micro-sociological theories do not sufficiently describe such grassroots processes because they do not consider special characteristics of project teams and decision support systems that influence the implementation. In particular, these models usually assume four points that do not match the specific characteristics of the implementation of decision support systems by a project team: they assume that upper management can mandate the use of the technology; they assume that organizational members are able to successfully implement the technology individually without a wide acceptance and level of integration within the organization; they assume that organizational members are granted the time to learn the technology slowly; or they assume that a fixed political structure exists that influences the implementation.
Building on the findings of the case study, the thesis, therefore, deductively integrates existing work that can explain parts of grassroots processes into a coherent theoretical model. The model explains how members working at the operational level of a project team make sense about a newly introduced decision support system and decide to utilize it in their local context. In this way, the thesis applies social sense making theory to decision support systems implementations and positions the grassroots technology implementation model into organizational choice theory, organizational multi-level theory, and organizational change theory.
Based on the theoretical model the thesis recommends that technology managers need to work closely together with local project teams during the implementation of decision support systems to support grassroots processes, instead of trying to push down standardized technology solutions through hierarchical structures. Additionally, the thesis proposes a project-centric research and software development methodology to inform the design of decision support systems that project teams need to implement in a grassroots fashion. The thesis suggests that technology developers use ethnographic action research to develop decision support systems that can easily be appropriated by project teams to changing project cultures. To provide validity and generality for the usefulness of the technology development methodology the thesis uses data from another set of four in-depth case studies that iteratively implemented technologies to support the decision making of project team members.

10. CIFE Calendar 2008