Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the College Classroom: A Prefabrication Strategy for Building Design

摘要

Construction of buildings - commercial office buildings, institutional facilities, mixed-use facilities, multi-family and single-family housing - is moving indoors. Fabrication of building components in a shop located away from the site of construction is called panelization, offsite fabrication, modular construction, or by the most widely used term, albeit a logically awkward term, prefabrication. To provide value, prefabrication must achieve useful purposes at affordable costs with acceptable schedules and adequate quality. The distinguishing feature of designing for prefabrication is interdisciplinary thinking: a means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily solved or answered by a single discipline. Viable prefabrication can only occur in a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration. A prefabrication strategy is being engaged in the classroom to facilitate the interdisciplinary collaboration of architecture, engineering and construction management students. The learning outcomes of this classroom strategy include cognitive outcomes (critical thinking skills), affective outcomes (managing emotions, clarifying purposes), and integrated development outcomes (group-problem solving, knowledge integration).