Room for More of Us? : Important Design Features for Informed Decision-Making in BIM-enabled Facility Management

Abstract: Building Information Modeling (BIM) is becoming imperative across building disciplines to improve communication and workflow from the first blueprint. Maintenance and facility management is however lagging behind in adoption and research of BIM. Utilizing research-through-design, this study explores BIM-enabled facility management and the critical practice of decision-making at the Celsius building in Uppsala. Contextual design and inquiry were applied to identify and suggest important design features that support decisions related to the task of establishing maximum room occupation. Results show that facility managers can make use of fuzzy multicriteria decision-making and expert heuristics to independently reach conclusions. Important design features were found to heavily rely on the existing building models, where context-view filtered to room capacity data in the existing BIM-system effectively supported the users’ assessment of data. The filtered, aggregated information presented in a simplified mobile format was insufficient for decision-making, suggesting that the building model was more important than initially perceived.