Collaborative, interdisciplinary teaching and engineering

In the A/E/C industry there is a strong need for the protection of competitive capacity, The share of traditional A/E/C-tasks within the total construction cost of a project is continuously declining, On the other hand, the degree and the complexity of technical equipment installed in buildings are increasing dramatically. Additionally we have to consider the ongoing re-organization processes in the A/E/C-industry. New company structures are introduced that provide companies with flexibility and dynamism. In the following, the experiences of an international multi-disciplinary project will be reported. In this project, architecture students from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, and civil engineering students from Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany worked together on a design project. The main focus was on how to use groupware and telecommunications meaningfully and successfully.