Choosing by advantages incorporated framework for a user-involved design process

Participation of stakeholders, such as users, in the design process remains significant in generating value of construction projects. This calls for new approaches in the interactions between designers and users towards collaboratively understanding and meeting user needs. A systematic framework, incorporating the Choosing By Advantages (CBA) decision system is, therefore, proposed as a contribution to improving designer-user collaboration for value generation in construction projects. The framework, resulting from an action-oriented constructive research approach, is based on a combination of empirical knowledge from the case application of CBA on selected projects in Ghana, and relevant theory. It is structured along the Input-Mediator-Output-Input scheme of team process, containing six performance episodes connected with reciprocal dependency loops. Guided by the pragmatist stance on truth, the workability of the framework was evaluated in a case study. The paper contributes to design process management and stakeholder involvement by providing a systematic guide on employing a multi-attribute decision system for designers and users to collaboratively discover, generate and authenticate value at the design stage of construction projects.Participation of stakeholders, such as users, in the design process remains significant in generating value of construction projects. This calls for new approaches in the interactions between designers and users towards collaboratively understanding and meeting user needs. A systematic framework, incorporating the Choosing By Advantages (CBA) decision system is, therefore, proposed as a contribution to improving designer-user collaboration for value generation in construction projects. The framework, resulting from an action-oriented constructive research approach, is based on a combination of empirical knowledge from the case application of CBA on selected projects in Ghana, and relevant theory. It is structured along the Input-Mediator-Output-Input scheme of team process, containing six performance episodes connected with reciprocal dependency loops. Guided by the pragmatist stance on truth, the workability of the framework was evaluated in a case study. The paper contributes to design process management and stakeholder involvement by providing a systematic guide on employing a multi-attribute decision system for designers and users to collaboratively discover, generate and authenticate value at the design stage of construction projects.