The Puzzle (Stanford's PBL Lab)
Integrated Project Delivery
The AEC Global Teamwork Program from Stanford’s PBL Lab engages students in a multi-disciplinary, collaborative and geographically distributed project. With a series of challenges for each discipline, the project results in the early collaboration between all the team members and disciplines to ensure a successful, environmentally conscious and on-budget design. This project challenges traditional linear processes were the design goes from the architect,to the engineers and finally to a construction managers, without a collaborative process that uses everyone’s abilities to address concerns together and more effectively.
The Puzzle
We developed two initial concepts; one was based on one of the most important forces we had to consider in our design, ‘The hurricane’, and the other was based on the concept of integration. We called the latter ‘The Puzzle’, and it was the one we chose for further development. It led us to divide the building in modules, adjusted to an organized 25’ x 30’ grid and integrate architecture and structure from the very initial decisions. This decision became the baseline for all other design and material choices. The Integrated Project Delivery approach resulted in a unified and team-owned design, and led us to win the design challenge. While our team succeeded in winning the Native Challenge as a result of individually skilled team members, what was in fact more important was our team process and coordination. Together we made some drastic decisions that we believe contributed to a much more innovative and interesting design.
Communication and Collaboration
One of the strongest aspects of our project was our collaboration as a team. Because we embraced our collaboration tools as both sources of communication and socialization, it meant that our response times were down to minutes and hours as opposed to days and even weeks for many global teams. Through our process we learned to use tools in more efficient ways. We organized meetings across time zones between group members and with professional mentors that gave us critiques one-on-one. One of the best examples of team integration was the way we used Teleplace–a virtual reality collaborative space– to actually experience our model in real‐time. Once we had completed our integrated model, we were able to bring it into Teleplace and look for conflicts as a team, with our clients.
