Advancing the Dialogue on Collaborative Models for Green Building Design

The researchers explored the connections of nearly one hundred architecture and engineering students from three institutions. The purpose was to examine the nature of how distance students collaborated with other disciplines on a common comprehensive architectural design problem. The findings are described in the article, “Socially Responsible Collaborative Models for Green Building Design,” located in the AIA Report on University Research, Volume 4. The results indicated why groups either chose the more difficult and unknown journey of completing a single architectural design with their distance partners, or returned to their local comfort zones and developed separate design responses. In this explanatory paper, the researchers reveal the significance of the broader research idea, its position in the schema of their collaborative research with BIM and the integrated practice design process, and subsequent applications in academic and industry settings for advancing the dialogue on distance collaboration.