Facilitating Architectural Communities of Practice

An architectural community of practice is formed by designers working together on a common goal. Members of this community share a common professional language where the vocabulary of this language represents a shared understanding. Members of a community of practice operate both by recording common knowledge into documents and by actively participating in social processes in order to personally contextualize this recorded knowledge. ArcIMap is a framework, consisting of a method and a computational model, that facilitates communities of practice to acquire, represent, share and reuse design information and knowledge, and targets the creation of situated digital environments where teams of designers communicate and collaborate using this information and knowledge. This paper describes ArcIMap, its background, and one of its implementations for a community of practice working on an urban renewal project in an educational context.