Architect and user interaction: The spoken representation of form and functional meaning

The paper is an investigation of the exchange of ideas and information between an architect and building users in the early stages of the building design process before the design brief or any drawings have been produced. The purpose of the research is to gain insight into the type of information users exchange with architects in early design conversations and to better understand the influence the format of design interactions and interactional behaviours have on the exchange of information. We report an empirical study of pre-briefing conversations in which the overwhelming majority of the exchanges were about the functional or structural attributes of space, discussion that touched on the phenomenological, perceptual and the symbolic meanings of space were rare. We explore the contextual features of meetings and the conversational strategies taken by the architect to prompt the users for information and the influence these had on the information provided. Recommendations are made on the format and structure of pre-briefing conversations and on designers' strategies for raising the level of information provided by the user beyond the functional or structural attributes of space.

A multi-agent architect for CSCW systems: from organisational semiotics perspective

This paper describes a multi-agent architecture to support CSCW systems modelling. Since CSCW involves different organizations, it can be seen as a social model. From this point of view, we investigate the possibility of modelling CSCW by agent technology, and then based on organizational semiotics method a multi-agent architecture is proposed via using EDA agent model. We explain the components of this multi-agent architecture and design process. It is argued that this approach provides a new perspective for modelling CSCW systems.