In Sweden representatives from the construction and building management industry have put forward a research and development program called: "IT-Bygg#2 2002 - Implementation". It aims at making IT the vehicle for decreasing the building costs and at the same time getting better quality and efficiency out of the industry.

The presented strategy is based on a seminar with some of the most experienced researchers, developers and practitioners of CAD in Sweden. The activities were recorded and annotated, analyzed and put together afterwards.

The proposal in brief is that object oriented distributed CAD is to be used in the long perspective. It will need to be based on international standards such as STEP and it will take at least another 5 years to get established.

Meanwhile something temporary has to be used. Pragmatically a "de facto standard" on formats has to be accepted and implemented. To support new users of IT all software in use in the country will be analyzed, described and published for a national platform for IT-communication within the construction industry.

Finally the question is discussed "How can architect schools then contribute to IT being implemented within the housing sector at a regional or national level?" Some ideas are presented: Creating the good example, better support for the customer, sharing the holistic concept of the project with all actors, taking part in an integrated education process and international collaboration like AVOCAAD and ECAADE.

The presentation of our still on-going didactic experience has been subdivided into phases, strictly interrelated The first one, almost over, is concerned with the analysis of the area and the representation of the collected data.

Digital media have a significant and strategic role to play toward this end. Of particular value are representational strategies that help disentangle issues, clarify alternatives and evaluate consequences of very complex and often emotional issues of land use, planning and design. This paper reports on the ELEMENTS OF NEIGHBORHOOD, a prototype 'electronic notebook' (relational database) tool developed to bring design information and example 'to the table' of a public workshop. Elements are examples of the building blocks of neighborhood (open spaces, housing, commercial, industrial, civic and network land uses) derived from built examples, and illustrated with graphic, narrative and numeric representations relevant to planning, design, energy, environmental and economic performance. Quantitative data associated with the elements can be linked to Geographic Information based maps and spreadsheet based-evaluation models.

Architectural design is perhaps most commonly described by the architect as consisting of the ability to see the whole picture, to organize, to collect, to juggle, to manage, and to maintain multiple conflicting goals and values. Architecture by the preceding definition is hierarchical and top-down in nature. The agent based experiment in this paper presents an alternative design process, involving multiple autonomous agents acting distributively. The agents (objects) move through the design landscape, simultaneously collaborating, building, degenerating, and transforming their world.

Pairs of participants were set a design problem and asked to solve it in face-to-face settings. The same problem was then tackled by participants in settings using two different modes of computer-supported communication: email and an electronic whiteboard. Protocols were collected and analyzed in terms of the constraints of each tool relative to the task and to each other. The GOMS methodology was used as a way to represent the collaborative design process in a way that yields information on both the productivity and performance of participants in each of the three experimental conditions. It also yielded information on the component elements of the design process, the basic cognitive building-blocks of design, thereby suggesting fundamentally new tools that might be created for interaction in virtual environments.

A further goal of the study was to explore the nature of task differences in relation to alternative platforms for communication. It was hypothesized that design processes involving significant negotiation would be less aided by computer support than straight forward design problems. The latter involve cooperative knowledge application by both participants and are therefore facilitated by information-rich forms of computer support. The former, on the other hand, requires conflict resolution and is inhibited by non face-to-face interaction. The results of this study point to the fact that the success of collaboration in virtual space is not just dependent on the nature of the tools but also on the specific nature of the collaborative task.

This paper presents the results of an intense design workshop that looks, probes, and builds at the very interface that is provoking the cultural and professional shifts. Media space is presented and used as an interpretive playground for design experimentation in which the poetics of representation (and not its technicalities) are the driving force to generate architectural ideas. The work discussed was originally developed as a starting exercise for a digital design course. The exercise was later conducted as a workshop at two schools of architecture by different faculty working in collaboration with it's inventor.

The workshop is an effective sketch problem that gives students an immediate start into a non-traditional, hands-on, and integrated use of contemporary media in the design process. In doing so, it establishes a procedural foundation for a design studio dealing with digital media.