Collaborative conceptual design involves intensive cross-disciplinary communication of design concepts and decisions. Difficulty in producing and expressing such information leads to extensive delays, miscommunication and confusion, which often have an impact upon the quality of the final design and the time required to achieve design consensus. Computer tools provide little support for the special needs for representation and reasoning posed by cross-disciplinary communication in collaborative conceptual building design. By building upon design theory, literature, and observations of a case study of an actual building design project, we identify and devise computational strategies for addressing these needs. Our objective is to help improve the communication among design team members. Our test case focuses on the communication between architects and structural engineers. We propose a conceptual framework for interdisciplinary communication to support collaborative conceptual design and present a prototype called Interdisciplinary Communication Medium (ICM). Our conceptualization suggests that designers propose a shared form model, interpret the form model into discipline models, critique the discipline form models to derive behavior and compare it to function, and explain the results to other members of the team. We present this propose-interpret-critique-explain paradigm as a communication cycle for collaborative conceptual building design. We explore and test the conceptualization by modeling it with an experimental software prototype, ICM, that tightly integrates graphic representations and AI reasoning about, the evolving building design. ICM provides a graphic environment as the central interface to software supporting collaborative design, rather than a central symbolic environment.

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