Qualitative analysis of visualization (original) (raw)

Qualitative analysis of visualization: a building design field study

2008

We conducted an ethnographic field study examining the ways in which building design teams used visual representations of data to coordinate their work. Here we describe our experience with this field study approach, including both quantitative and qualitative analysis of field study data. Conducting a field study enabled us to effectively examine real work practice of a diverse team of experts, which would have been nearly impossible in a laboratory study. We also found that structured qualitative analysis methods provided deeper insight into our results than our initial quantitative approach. Our experience suggests that field studies and qualitative analysis could have substantial benefit in visualization and could nicely complement existing quantitative laboratory studies.

Visualization in collaborative engineering design

PsycEXTRA Dataset

Architects and engineers create and communicate in a highly visual environment; the way they visualize their designs and communicate throughout the design-construction process fundamentally affects the quality and flow of work in the construction project. Such collaborating disciplines require specific forms of support to coordinate their efforts, communicate, and resolve conflicts. This work hypothesizes that good visualization depends on a contextual approach, that is to say, good visualization depends upon the context of the task, user, and environment. The study established a theoretical basis for the relationship of visualization to the cognitive and collaborative process that occurs in the facility life-cycle process through a presentation of a range of experiment and observation. The study also presented the roles of visualization in collaborative engineering design, specifically emphasizing ethnographic and seenario-based simulation studies, with supplemental interviews and questionnaires.

Visualizations in the Planning Process

CAADRIA proceedings

Visualizations are playing an important role in the formulation and communication of design concepts. Various types of visualizations are being used in the planning process for the presentation of architectural design projects and planning scenarios. This study examines the process of working with visualizations in planning in Norway, and how it is being used as a means to communicate information. Two types of pilot studies were conducted. The first was a survey that sought to find out what visualization is being used by planners in Norway today. The second study was conducted in the Virtual Reality laboratory at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and explored how different methods of visualization is being understood and experienced by lay people and professionals. Despite the fact that 2D visualizations (e.g. maps, floor plans, sections, elevations) and BIM visualizations can prove to be less engaging and understandable compared to 3D realistic model visualizations, the findings indicates that the use of mixed methods can provide a better overall understanding of a project.

Visual Management in Mid-sized Construction Design Projects

Procedia Economics and Finance, 2015

Visual Management has emerged during the past decades within manufacturing and service organizations, as a system that through visualization enables the employees to better understand their role and contribution in relation to both their own organizational values and costumer needs. Visual management is not well known within the construction industry; however, the importance of visualization is well recognized. In construction design, two types of visual means are frequently applied, i.e., 3D models and visual planning. These visual means support communication and mutual understanding during design, but do however not address the management of the project. The aim of this article is to explore how visual means support the design in terms of coordination and how they utilize the potential that exists in a multi-disciplinary design team. For exploring how visual means support the design coordination, we conducted and compared two case studies qualitatively in a construction design setting. Both case studies were followed throughout the entire design process, where the design teams were semi-collocated. More than 15 semi-structured interviews were recorded and transcribed. Both cases were residential in-house projects. Based on our findings we contribute with the following: (1) by using multiple visual means, i.e., visual management, the design teams become more self-going. (2) However, the self-going supported by visual management is primarily related to a collocated setting and active engagement of all actors involved.

Visualisation in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC

Automation in Construction, 2005

In the architecture, engineering and construction industries, computer visualization usage can cover the whole lifecycle of a product from presentation of initial concepts to the final stages of production and can also extend to maintenance issues. Threedimensional walkthroughs can be created from hand drawn sketches at the very early stages of the design process. Threedimensional models can be used by design teams to communicate design intent to client and users and to compare and evaluate design options. During more advanced stages of design, three-dimensional representations can be used to check the integrity of services coordination, accessibility and maintainability. During construction, visualization can facilitate the interpretation of design details by site operatives. The concept of visualization is not limited to modeling physical objects but can extend to the representation of abstract data sets of the type obtained from simulation programs used in performance assessment or from Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications. This paper will review the application of visualization in the process of design and construction and then present findings from three research projects that made use of some of these techniques at various stages of the process: for collaborative working during concept design stage, for design development and marketing in the house building sector, and for the modeling of design details during the construction stage. D

Designing and Evaluating Visualization Techniques for Construction Planning

Computing in Civil and Building Engineering (2000), 2000

Construction project teams view project information with traditional paper-based methods that have remained largely unchanged with the advent of computers and electronic project information. Observations of project teams show that these methods fail to support critical group decision-making tasks because they do not communicate relationships between project information. There is an opportunity to design and evaluate the use of visualization techniques to visually communicate relationships between project information. This paper discusses our research efforts to prototype and evaluate two visualization techniques-highlight and overlay-that visually relate project information.

Building performance simulation visualisation: boardroom visualizations or knowledge exchange

A strong nexus has emerged between societal awareness and governmental targets to decrease the built environment's carbon footprint. This led to tightening of building performance regulations and aware clients demanding that their buildings' exceed regulatory conformity. Building Performance Simulation (BPS) outputs are key tools for building assessments. This paper poses the question 'How does the visualization of building performance simulation play a role in reasoning, communicating and exchanging knowledge in the boardroom'. BPS relies on a number of computational tools that give possible performance scenarios to multi-variant performance domains. Experts make a selective choice to exchange managed BPS results and eventually sophisticated information visualization techniques are used to overcome cognitive capacity limitations and overload in the boardroom. The paper links findings from experts' interviews to literature to explore how experts in BPS externalize knowledge through high resolution visualizations in the boardroom where major design and financial decisions take place.

Visual data exploration in sustainable building design

Visual methods of exploring and communicating data are particularly important to the field of building simulation, where there is always a lot of data but it is not necessarily well-understood or well-presented. Tools have been developed to help address this issue. Three case studies are presented, covering tools that focus on interactive data exploration, animation of data, and multi-objective optimisation data. Each gives feedback on their use on live projects obtained from open-ended questionnaires and informal interviews. It is concluded that such tools can significantly enhance the exploration, understanding and communication of simulation data for sustainable building design.

Re-viewing the Builder’s Yard as a Place for Design Visualization

2013

This paper proposes the “Builder’s Yard” as an urban site for visualizing and making community design decisions. The primary objective is to understand how the Builder’s Yard might function in urban communities, particularly inner-city areas, as a place for working out community design alternatives and as a new type of community center for educational and experimental construction activity. The research begins by evaluating Christopher Alexander’s version of the Builder’s Yard from his work The Production of Houses. This paper critically explores and expands on the work of Alexander and other practitioners in order to understand how community design and construction activity might be integrated in a centrally located, highly urbanized site (in contrast to the exurban condition of Alexander’s project) – allowing for a more diverse group of participants and resulting in a greater degree of design visualization. One premise for this project is that the design visualization facilitated ...

A Systematic Review of Visualization in Building Information Modeling

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2019

Building Information Modeling (BIM) employs data-rich 3D CAD models for large-scale facility design, construction, and operation. These complex datasets contain a large amount and variety of information, ranging from design specifications to real-time sensor data. They are used by architects and engineers for various analysis and simulations throughout a facility's life cycle. Many techniques from different visualization fields could be used to analyze these data. However, the BIM domain still remains largely unexplored by the visualization community. The goal of this article is to encourage visualization researchers to increase their involvement with BIM. To this end, we present the results of a systematic review of visualization in current BIM practice. We use a novel taxonomy to identify main application areas and analyze commonly employed techniques. From this domain characterization, we highlight future research opportunities brought forth by the unique features of BIM. For instance, exploring the synergies between scientific and information visualization to integrate spatial and non-spatial data. We hope this article raises awareness to interesting new challenges the BIM domain brings to the visualization community.