Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
3.3
Creating Proper Categorized Knowledge
for Building Industry Community of Practice
What I have explained in the last few paragraphs in this chapter implies that the two
concepts of categorized knowledge and community of practice have the potential to
become the strong holding columns of the structure of the future building design and
construction industry. Each individual in this community should feel responsible for
generating or adding to the existing collections of categorized knowledge for the ben-
efi t of the whole community. These contributions could come from individuals seek-
ing higher education, or based on every day work experience of other professionals.
The purpose of this section by no means is to create a complete categorized
knowledge resource for the building design and construction community of prac-
tice, but it is just to present a starting point to be followed by the enthusiastic stu-
dents and engineers to generate a relatively strong and applicable categorized
knowledge resource for the benefi t of the whole industry.
In order to create an overall categorized knowledge document for the building
design and construction entity which is useful for training the new employees in
both consulting architectural-engineering fi rms and construction companies, natu-
rally the fi rst step is to specify the main categories. For our approach it makes good
sense to divide all the concepts, parameters and players that will be covered in this
fi eld into two non-overlapping main categories of (1) professionals and their func-
tions, and (2) applications. It should be reemphasized here again that the following
approach is not the only acceptable approach, and there would be many different
possible approaches that could generate even more powerful results. Of course other
categories can be selected by different individuals or groups interested in generating
this tool for their own targeted purposes. By the way our fi rst main category creates
an umbrella for covering all the people (community of practice), their responsibili-
ties, functions, and tools that they have to utilize in executing their tasks and the
second category creates an environment for expressing building types, its compo-
nents and design requirements. From here on we can generate secondary branches
in order to develop explanatory information for each of these two main categories.
Therefore the next obvious step is to categorize the major professional groups that
are involved in building design and construction functions along with the individu-
als who are performing assigned tasks in each group. These professionals can be
specifi ed as architects, engineers, contractors, code offi cials, etc. The functions and
duties of these professionals then can be investigated and summarized in detail for-
mat. This procedure will lead to generation of copious number of functions, duties
and concepts that can be categorized and assigned to each individual. Since each
member of this community of practice belongs to one specifi c trade category, it
makes sense to start building our categorized knowledge by creating the main sub-
branches, such as HVAC, plumbing, and electrical. If at this time we turn our focus
on to providing guidelines for each of these professionals the next step would be to
specify all the functions and duties of each professional such as the HVAC engineer
and HVAC contractor as a subset for HVAC fi eld. Functions and duties of HVAC
