TRACKING DECISION-MAKING DURING ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN SUBMITTED: January 2004 REVISED: May 2005 PUBLISHED: June 2005 at http://www.itcon.org/2005/10/ EDITOR: B-C Björk Grahame S. Cooper, Professor Information Systems Institute, University of Salford, England email: G.S.Cooper@salford.ac.uk Cristina Cerulli, Dr. School of Architecture, University of Sheffield, England Bryan R. Lawson, Professor School of Architecture, University of Sheffield, England email: B.Lawson@sheffield.ac.uk Chengzhi Peng, Dr. School of Architecture, University of Sheffield, England Yacine Rezgui, Professor Information Systems Institute, University of Salford, England email: Y.Rezgui@salford.ac.uk SUMMARY: There is a powerful cocktail of circumstances governing the way decisions are made during the architectural design process of a building project. There is considerable potential for misunderstandings, inappropriate changes, change which give rise to unforeseen difficulties, decisions which are not notified to all interested parties, and many other similar problems. The paper presents research conducted within the frame of the EPSRC funded ADS project aiming at addressing the problems linked with the evolution and changing environment of project information to support better decision-making. The paper presents the conceptual framework as well as the software environment that has been developed to support decision-making during building projects, and reports on work carried out on the application of the approach to the architectural design stage. This decision-tracking environment has been evaluated and validated by professionals and practitioners from industry using several instruments as described in the paper. KEYWORDS: decision tracking; architectural design; versioning of information. 1. INTRODUCTION Building projects require a design process capable of dealing with an extraordinarily wide range of complex issues. Decisions must be made about the layout, form, appearance, materials, methods of construction and many other factors in order to satisfy the needs of both ‘paymaster’ and ‘user’ clients, as well as a wide range of generic and type specific building control legislation. Many different professional consultants are involved in making and approving these decisions. Even average sized building contracts involve design processes which may span many months and possibly years. Larger building contracts may require design decisions to be made over periods extending into many years. Such decisions are multi-dimensional combining together factors which range from the highly subjective to the perfectly objective. The decisions are made by many individuals often belonging to different organisations and having different skills, process maturity and ICT capabilities. They are made over very long periods of time in an iterative manner and are commonly revisited weeks, months and even years after they were originally taken, leaving scope for a variety of potential problems and inconsistencies. In this context, much research effort is expended on encouraging integration between actors in construction projects by integrating information representations through information model harmonization: for example, the Industry Foundation Classes (see (IAI 2005)) and (Marir et al., 1998), through document-based integration (for ITcon Vol. 10 (2005), Cooper et al, pg. 125