Alternate means of digital design communication

This thesis reconceptualises communication in digital design as an integrated social and technical process. The friction in the communicative processes pertaining to digital design can be traced to the fact that current research and practice emphasise technical concerns at the expense of social aspects of design communication. With the advent of BIM (Building Information Modelling), a code model of communication (machine-to-machine) is inadequately applied to design communication. This imbalance is addressed in this thesis by using inferential models of communication to capture and frame the psychological and social aspects behind the communicative contracts between people. Three critical aspects of the communicative act have been analysed, namely (1) data representation, (2) data classification and (3) data transaction, with the help of a new digital design communication platform, Speckle, which was developed during this research project for this purpose. By virtue of an applied living laboratory context, Speckle facilitated both qualitative and quantitative comparisons against existing methodologies with data from real-world settings. Regarding data representation (1), this research finds that the communicative performance of a low-level composable object model is better than that of a complete and universal one as it enables a more dynamic process of ontological revision. This implies that current practice and research operates at an inappropriate level of abstraction. On data classification (2), this thesis shows that a curatorial object-based data sharing methodology, as opposed to the current file-based approaches, leads to increased relevancy and a reduction in noise (information without intent, or meaning). Finally, on data transaction (3), the analysis shows that an object-based data sharing methodology is technically better suited to enable communicative contracts between stakeholders. It allows for faster and more meaningful change-dependent transactions, as well as allow for the emergence of traceable communicative networks outside of the predefined exchanges of current practices.