Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
enter the class nor should stop when they leave the class. Instead, the process of
learning should be looked at as a full time social event in which our learning skill
develops by experiencing, doing, belonging to, and fi nally becoming part of a com-
munity of practice.
The process of learning as a social event for the fi eld of building design and con-
struction which comprises architects, engineers, and contractors as the main partici-
pants and many others as it has been discussed earlier in this topic can be explained
based on the Etienne Wenger's model. To achieve this target, the way of character-
izing social participation of design and construction fi eld participants as a process
of learning then can be described by the following explanations.
The fi rst defi nition is the process of learning by negotiation about our experiences
including our projects, fi ndings, innovations, and mistakes. Nothing can help a
professional better than learning lessons from other's mistakes. Some fi rms keep a
records of what has been the source of problem in previous designs and of course
what the solutions have been to those problems. Therefore everybody in the fi rm can
refer to these records later and learn from the previous mistakes. Some fi rms dedicate
special teams to quality control of the projects as their sole responsibility. Such
teams have the advantage of seeing many repeated mistakes in different designs and
quickly locate and underline them. The original design team members then can learn
from these quality controls review comments. When a group of engineers in a fi rm
start to design for example a new performance center which has never been done by
them, it always pays off to spend some valuable time and talk to other engineers in
the fi rm or even with other engineers, architects and even contractors that have pre-
vious experience in designing similar projects. A reputable contractor or an ally
engineering fi rm can communicate their previous experiences with other engineers
who had failed to perform a successful design, high-lights the sources of problem
and even offers the best solutions based on previous confl icts. It is also very helpful
to look back in the history of similar projects if it is accessible in their own fi rm.
Going back through emails and records of similar projects and talk to old project's
managers or engineers, even Internet search helps the design team to understand
what has been the source of success or lack of success of such projects. All these
communications, studies, negotiations, and learning should happen even before the
design team actually starts their new design. In fact this process should resemble
having many training sessions before the actual design. The more training is done the
higher the chances are that it will result in a more successful project and fewer prob-
lems. A very good example of another similar process is what in industry is known
as hiring and training co-ops while they are still in the school. These co-ops periodi-
cally work in the engineering offi ces for a minimum pay, but what they learn here
makes them ready for work as soon as they are graduated. Of course during period
of their hire as co-ops, they still are not ready to produce professional products. What
they do during their attendance in the engineering fi rm is experiencing. They observe,
question and help the professional engineers to produce real-life design products.
This can simply be defi ned as the fi rst step in the long process of learning.
The second step is the learning by talking about, improving and criticizing the
shared sources, frameworks and perspectives that can sustain mutual engagement in
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