Digital cooperative studio 07-08

Teaching cooperation-related issues to AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) students is a major stake nowadays. There are many reasons for that: construction projects become more and more complex and cooperation practices are evolving in both organizational and IT-based ways. It is notably for these reasons that the issue of IT is addressed in most of the AEC-oriented schools and universities. Traditionally IT is taught to support the tasks of each specific construction field (e.g. CAD for architects, simulation tools for static engineers etc.). The Digital Cooperative Studio, presented in this article, considers IT as a support to cooperation and especially its communication and coordination dimensions. Moreover, we describe here a living lab involving students, teachers and researchers. This strong link between research and teaching allows both the students to be "analysts" of their real project situations and the researchers to experiment their development in real project situations.