Collaboration Between The Architect & The Client Via The World Wide Web:

Introduction:

Clients in the building and construction industry are sometimes perceived as puzzling by architects who fail to understand their design input and criticism of proposed schemes. To the architect's, such criticism often seems irrational and contradictory. Decisions may be delayed and/or worse, frequently changed even after the project is well into the construction stage. On the other hand, the clients may feel intimidated when their needs and preferences are ignored by architects. Communication may break down and any feelings of mutual trust and respect - so essential to successful projects, disappear. A current trend therefore, driven by both the architect's need to survive fiscally and the client's need to obtain service, has required all parties to be more responsible in their personal transactions. This somewhat coerced symbiosis has a positive spin - collaboration. In today's media and digital driven world, which is gradually becoming the essential mode of survival to the extent of the very existence and success of professions, it has been necessary to tap web collaboration techniques in order to help bridge and enhance the architect - client relationship. The Internet, which became a major "cultural change" that started in the 1990's with the advent of the World Wide Web, has become the focus of attention both within and without the architecture profession. Digital technology has become a powerful information superhighway with the Internet suddenly exploding and generating great excitement. As the spread of the Internet and globalization of economics, the paradigm of design activity is drastically changing. Architects are increasing their use of modern electronic communications. Particularly there is an increasing need for the continuous collaboration in geographically distributed design teams as well as their clients. Major CAD software vendors, in fact, have come up with lots of fancy new software to facilitate the process. Oddly enough, however, most design professionals are using older, cheaper and still effective collaboration tools - tools that often come free with any modern personal computer. The newer tools are most often needed when the number of project documents requiring collaboration is large, when more than two or three professionals have to collaborate, or when the same drawings have to be modified by several people (separated by sometimes great distances) at the same time. My intent in this research is to explore what is available in creating/enhancing web collaboration between the architect (and other related design professionals) and his client. I also focus on how this technology works, on how design professionals are using it now, and what they have gained or lost in doing so. Web collaboration is still in its infancy as it is no more than ten years old and still in the process of being developed, but it possess a valuable potential and opportunity in accelerating the design process. Most of the information I have obtained is from articles written by architectural experts who have explored the use of the web as a means of collabration. Such information was obtained from articles written by them and published in architectural magazines.

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