Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Mobile and Pervasive
Computing: The Future
for Design Collaboration
Mi Jeong Kim, Mary Lou Maher and Ning Gu
9.1 Introduction
Design in practice has become collaborative in nature in a global and computer
mediated context. Accordingly, a variety of technologies that support collaborative
design has been developed for the Architecture, Engineering and Construction
(AEC) domain in the past decade. Collaborative technologies have transformed the
nature of collaboration in working practices and increased opportunities for
communication and interaction among members of a design team. According
to the notion of scale defined by Weiser (1991), collaborative technologies need to
be scaled up with respect to physical space, people and time for supporting
collaboration. More recently, as mobile computing becomes more convenient
and capable, it is seen that collaboration is possible anywhere and anytime. While
there has been significant progress in the development of technologies to support
desktop collaboration, only just recently is progress being seen in mobile com-
puting. Mobility has become essential and now includes access to a shared
representation as well as personal communication in spatially distributed design
teams and co-located design teams (Bellotti and Bly, 1996).
The idea of ubiquitous computing introduced by Weiser (1991) is to realize
environments augmented with computational resources for supporting everyday
life. The computational resources are embedded in different kinds of devices on
different scales, such as handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs), digital tablets,
smart phones, and desk and wall-sized electronic screens. In terms of Human-
Computer Interaction (HCI), by combining mobile and pervasive technologies, we
have broken out of the “desktop” box where user interfaces have been stuck for the
past 30 years (Myers
et al
., 2000). The features of working afforded by the mobile
and pervasive technologies are often characterized in terms of access to information
and people anytime, anywhere (Perry
et al
., 2001). The form of access that many
mobile technologies provides may not be equivalent to that allowed by being in the
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