PRESENTATION OF 'INFORMATION IN THE BUILDING INDUSTRY - PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS' The Editor Go to the list of modules SUMMARY THE INFORMATION PROBLEM IN BUILDING INFORMATION NEEDS The information needs of building practice The flow of information from research to practice NOTES AND REFERENCES To our friend and supporter, Junji Hiyamuta. Click here to download the Word 6.0 .doc version of the article. (35 K) THE INFORMATION PROBLEM IN BUILDING Top of page The decade culminating with the end of the twentieth century is consistently referred to in terms that emphasize information - the information revolution, information as the key to commercial success, in-formation as a common resource for researchers, information as the raison d'être of Internet ... . Even if these descriptions properly suggest a radical switch from commerce based on the smoke-stack industries and sweat labor of preceding decades, they provide no guidance as to how to reorganize one's modus operandi in this 'information world'; at best they promote a sense of guilt that supposedly motivates one to bravely enter the world of computer science and informatics. This electronic document looks beyond the seductions of information science and information technology - and it does so with an explicit purpose: to contribute to the improvement of the building process by facilitating the choice of an appropriate information strategy. If the challenge is to provide decision-makers with appropriate information in an adequate form at the right time, then the building industry should be able to perform better - both in terms of the processes and procedures it uses - if the information is available as required. Information technology and computer science will facilitate meeting this challenge but not replace it. In other words, this document is about the 'information problem' in building. Through the ex-perience of specialists working in the field of documentation for building research and practice, the document suggests the importance of the information resource and proposes strategies for optimizing its use. In all cases, the experience is filtered through a fine-tuned understanding of the particularities of the building industry and of the organization of the processes it is responsible for. In all cases, too, the experience has been built up over a number of years, thus blending a continuing observation of the needs of researchers and practitioners with a sensitivity to the trends that are more and more rapidly influencing the built environment and its transformation. The objectives of this document are, therefore, to contribute to improving the use of informa-tion as an aid (i) to decision-making in building design, manufacture and construction and (ii) to the promotion of research and innovation in the building sector. INFORMATION NEEDS Top of page The information needs of the researchers, professionals and enterprises that make up the building industry are many and varied - as many and varied as the involvements of these participants in the designing, manufacturing, constructing, controlling and innovating aspects of the building process as a whole. Looked at more closely, it is apparent that the information in question falls into two categories: (a) project-related information and (b) general information. Project-related information, as its name implies, denotes information that is particular to an individual project and is accumulated during the project-related processes of design, manufacture and construction. General information is, at least in principle, available to nourish the processes of any construction or any research project; it is accumulated constantly as more and more is learnt about building-related technology, and about the application of the human and natural sciences to building. These two kinds of information have different 'lives', i.e. they exist within different environments and time-scales: -The information that is progressively created and/or collected to comprise the project-related information files 'disappears' into the project; that is to say, its use is required to assist the decision processes of the project in question. Once all the decisions have been made (and the project is materialized), there is no need to keep the information (other than the information required for archives and for maintenance purposes). Project-related information, therefore, is generated progressively over the duration of any one project. It starts with the brief of the 'client' (irrespective of whether the brief is developed by a building client communicating with industry professionals or in a research mandate proposed to a member of the scientific community). This brief is coupled with the researchers' or practitioners' experience and is completed by contextual understandings (such as the site in the case of building projects or the scientific environment in the case of a research project). From this restricted beginning, the project-related information builds up and is transformed as the project advances, leading ultimately to the production of a novel environment or a new body of research knowledge. In the case of knowledge generated in the context of producing a new built environment, the functional and technical information built up around the project is 'lost' - in the sense that it is embodied in the product [1], and can only be retrieved or reconstituted by de-coding the project or 'reading' it as the art historians are wont to say. On the other hand, the freshly acquired knowledge in a research project is published, that is to say, restituted as information that is added to the accumulation of general information available for public access. The extent to which this information is actually used, is a question that will be addressed shortly; indeed, the information that is restituted is not always as directly usable as might seem at first.  -In contrast, general information refers to information that is not specific to any one project, be it a research or a building project. On the contrary, it covers information that (i) has to be sought for in some general repository of information (a library or a reference base of some sort) and (ii) has to undergo some transformation or 'translation' to be useful in the context of a specific project. General information has to be constantly up-dated and made available as a support service for any decision-maker. Put another way, the project team members - when confronted by a decision-making situation for which they feel insufficiently informed - venture into the world of general information. However, several research projects [2] have shown that practitioners are reluctant to search for this kind of information for a number of reasons, includ-ing (a) the fact that collecting information is not felt to be a 'productive' activity and (b) much of the information is not available in a suitable form quickly enough to help solve the problem being en-countered. One of the essential characteristics of the processes of building up project-related information is that the responsible practitioners can, in principle at least, consult general information sources at any time to supplement any perceived shortcomings in the former; the two kinds of in-formation do not exist in totally separate compartments, despite the differences in their uses and in their characteristics. The information needs of building practice Top of page Studies of the various steps in the processes of building design, manufacture and construction show that these processes are essentially composed of a sequence of decisions, implying that information has to be appropriately available to support making decisions which match the objectives. This, in itself, hardly seems surprising, since modern well-managed indus-trial processes are generally based on decisions are only made on the basis of the best available information. However, in the building sector, this is not generally the case nor, indeed, can it easily be so. What is important in characterizing the building industry [3] and its modus operandi is the fact (i) that there is a large number of separate participants on any one project, each of whom has his/her own characteristics, particularly regarding information acquisition and use, and (ii) that these participants only come together to form an unique, short-lived 'team' [4] which has to learn 'from scratch' to use its information in an intelligent and systematic way. Information in an R. and D. environment A different set of considerations enters into play in the context of information produced by researchers for researchers or innovators. In the R. and D. context, the operations of which are fundamentally different from the processes of building practice, the constraints of fragmentation and of discontinuity do not apply. Instead, one is in the more familiar territory of conventional in-formation handling, well known to classical documentation services; context stability enables pro-cedures and systems to be developed. However, that is not to say that there are no problems; in-deed, a major difficulty stems from the multi-disciplinarity of the relevant research domains: human and natural sciences, management, and history - all of which are applicable at urban, infrastructure, building or product scales, and each of which has its specialized vocabulary. The flow of information from research to practice Top of page So far it has been argued that the building process - as presently organized - is not conducive to a systematic use of information, for what may be called 'structural reasons'. It has also been suggested that the flow of information from research to practice (or from the field of general information to that of project-related information) is not as smooth as might be expected or desired. This is what is referred to as the 'information problem'. It is a problem that affects all the steps of the 'information transactions':   -the dissemination of information generated by research, -the treatment of research information by the documentation intermediaries (libraries and ref-erence banks on the one hand, publishers of books and periodicals on the other), -the retrieval of information by practitioners and its incorporation into their project-related information systems. The information problem is not insuperable. Indeed, by building on experience and thus by paying the appropriate attention to each step in the 'information irrigation' process, it is possible to turn the problem into solutions. These solutions are exemplified in the following sections of this document. NOTES AND REFERENCES Top of page 1. The 'as-built' files given over to the building owner provide no explanations of how the project took form; they are limited to factual descriptions that describe the situation 'at the end of play'. (Go back) 2. See, for example, Mackinder, Margaret. (1982). Design Decision Making in Architectural Practice, York, The University of York Institute for Advanced Architectural Studies Research Paper 19, BRANZ. (1984). Abbreviated Report of Information Dissemination Strategies, Porirua (N.Z.), Building Research Association of New Zealand, 60 pp., and Bardin, Sylvie, Gérard Blachère and Colin H. Davidson. (1993). "Are Research results Used in Practice?", Building Research and Information, 21:6, 347-354. (Go back) 3. The term 'building industry' is used broadly here; it is intended to cover both professional and commercial enter-prises, ranging from architects' and engineers' offices through to sub-contractors and manufacturers; it also in-cludes approvals agencies, trade associations etc. (Go back) 4. In management jargon, this team is called a 'temporary multi-organization'; each one is formed by selection from within a 'multi-industry' (the building industry). (Go back)     Copyright © IF Research Corporation and CIB 1998 All rights reserved