There has been growing interest in the adoption of advanced digital technologies in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector, as shown by the increasing number of review studies on the adoption of Digital Twin (DT) in the sector. While previous reviews on DT in the AEC sector have emphasised the technical opportunities and challenges, reviews that take a specific organisational and management focus on the use of DT are lacking. In this systematic review, we close this gap by analysing 102 papers from three main scientific databases (Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science), which emphasise organisational and management aspects of using DT in the AEC sector across the project and asset lifecycle phases. The findings indicate that, whereas there is still a stronger focus on finding optimisations for various performance concerns (e.g. project efficiency, health and safety and maintenance performance), there is increasing awareness and interest in using DT to encourage collaboration and (end-)user participation. Despite this recognition, our review also identified a number of critical knowledge gaps on the use and user perspectives of DT, which includes how powerful computational tools can be developed into user-friendly interfaces to reduce complexity and increase accessibility to all stakeholders in the decision-making process, and how participatory design frameworks can be combined with structured feedback systems and standardised data access protocols in order to stimulate communication, continuous improvement, and data-driven decision making.

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Stairs are among the key elements in architectural composition, both aesthetically and spatially. They are also one of the main innovations in architecture and building, allowing pedestrians to bridge considerable height differences with relative efficiency. It is, therefore, surprising that, in spite of all stair regulations in building codes, stairs are responsible for a huge number of accidents—second only to motorcars. The extent of safety failures suggests that user interaction with stairs is poorly understood by designers and policy makers. This is not unrelated to the lack of research into the design and use of stairs. Templer’s seminal work is the exception, but it dates from 1992, and since then, little has been done to understand the relation between architectural design and stair performance, including safety. The paper reviews the literature on stairs in multiple domains and proposes that to redress poor stair performance, research and practice should build on affordance-based analyses of stair climbability, which establish a clear connection between the form of a stair and the perception of both action possibilities and dangers by all kinds of users. By doing so, affordances establish a comprehensive and consistent framework for the analysis of architectural designs, which utilizes both domain and psychological knowledge, including as a foundation for computational applications.@en

Social participation in school, including schoolyard interactions, is considered important for all aspects of child development. Students with disabilities, such as those who are deaf and hard-of-hearing, are at risk of experiencing inaccessibility and social exclusion in mainstream classes, yet this has been hardly researched in the schoolyard context. We exploratively compared preadolescents (M = 10.48, SD =.93) with (N = 8) and without (N = 207) hearing loss in their continuous schoolyard interactions during 21 recess assessments, using proximity sensors and field observations, alongside measurements of peer acceptance, friendships and sense of connectedness, based on peer nominations and self-reports. Deaf and hard-of-hearing preadolescents spent less time interacting in the schoolyard, a trend which was stable throughout recess. Deaf and hard-of-hearing students interacted with the same number of partners as their classmates, but posthoc analyses suggest that towards the end of long recess periods they had a sharper drop in the number of their interaction partners. Field observations suggest that deaf and hard-of-hearing preadolescents who were socially active became more isolated the longer the break lasted, and that physical proximity did not necessarily indicate positive interactions. Findings underscore the importance of using multimethod designs that assess various dimensions of social participation and account for the temporal dynamics of recess interactions. Proximity sensors, combined with qualitative observations, enabled to detect social difficulties not detected by more traditional measures, hence valuable for social inclusion research and interventions.

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Building information modelling (BIM) has ushered in the era of symbolic building representation: building elements and spaces are described not by graphical elements but by discrete symbols, each with properties and relations that explicitly integrate all information. Digital twinning promises even more: a digital replica in complete sync with the building and its behaviour. Such technologies have obvious appeal for circularity because they accommodate the rich information it requires and link circularity goals to other activities in AECO (architecture, engineering, construction and operation of buildings).

Present implementations of BIM may fall short of the promise, and digital twinning may be hard to achieve, but they remain crucial not only for circularity but for all AECO disciplines. To realise the potential of such representations, information should be treated not as a product of integration but as the integrator of all activities. Similarly, digitalisation should be at the core of business models and deployment plans, not an additional or even optional layer at a high cost. This calls for a coherent approach that includes the full capture of building information, supports the detailed exploration of circular operations, uses the results to constrain decisions and actions and does so throughout the life cycle.@en

Planning regulations determine a substantial part of buildings, but their constraints are usually not included in the setup of a BIM model or used explicitly for design guidance, but only tested in compliance checks once a model has been made. This is symptomatic of wider tendencies and ingrained biases that emphasize tacit knowledge and assume that information in a project starts from scratch—an assumption that runs contrary to predesign information ordering practices, as well as to the findings of creativity studies. In terms of process control, it negates important possibilities for feedforward. The paper proposes that BIM and design computerization, in general, should avoid the generate-and-test view of design, the view of design knowledge as tacit, and the adherence to analogue workflows, but develop, instead, approaches and workflows that keep information explicit and utilize it to frame design problems. To demonstrate this, we describe an exercise in which the expectation that the geometric representation of planning regulations returns permissible building envelopes was tested on the basis of a large number of cases produced by students who each collected planning regulations for a particular plot of land in the Netherlands and modelled their constraints in BIM, using a workflow that can be accommodated within the scope of predesign information gathering in any project. The results confirm that, for a large part of Dutch housing, the representation of planning regulations in BIM returns the permissible building envelope, and, so, forms a clear frame for subsequent design actions. They also suggest that including such information in the setup of a model is constructive and feasible, even for novices, and produces a bandwidth view of project information that integrates pre-existing information in a BIM workflow through feedforward. By extension, they also indicate a potential for a closer relation between analysis and synthesis in BIM, characterized by transparency and simultaneity, as well as the thorough understanding of problem constraints required for both efficiency and creativity.@en

School-based interventions for socially including autistic pupils in mainstream schools were systematically reviewed. Included interventions targeted at least one level of the school environment: the autistic children, the peers, the staff, and/or the physical environment, and assessed autistic pupils’ quantity and/or quality of social participation as outcome measures. Findings from 56 studies showed increased accessibility of school activities to autistic pupils, but the reciprocity and friendship between the autistic pupils and the peers were not necessarily improved. Moreover, limited interventions were available for modifying the physical environment. A more holistic strategy that moves the focus from individual children’s social skills to the larger context surrounding children, should be considered for a better inclusion of autistic children in school routine.

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Autistic children are often reported less socially connected, while recent studies show autistic children experiencing more loneliness in school than allistic (i.e. non-autistic) children, contradicting the traditional view that autistic children lack social motivation. This study aimed to understand individual differences in how social connectedness is construed, between and within groups of autistic and allistic pupils, using a multimethod approach. Forty-seven autistic and 52 neurodiverse-allistic classmates from two special primary schools participated (8–13 years). Proximity sensors worn by pupils on playgrounds during recess measured (1) total time in face-to-face contacts, (2) number of contact partners, and (3) centrality in playground networks. Peer reports measured (4) reciprocal friendships and (5) centrality in classmate networks. To evaluate their feelings of connectedness, pupils rated the level of loneliness in school. Compared with allistic pupils, autistic pupils had fewer reciprocal friendships, but similar total time in social contacts, number of partners, classmate/playground centrality, and levels of loneliness. Lower levels of loneliness related to higher classmate centrality in autistic children, but longer time in social contacts in allistic children. For these autistic children, being liked as part of a peer group seems essential. Understanding relevant differences in children’s needs could lead to a more welcoming school climate.@en

Categorization of technologies by the order of their inbetweenness is a useful device for parsing complex structures info fundamental parts and understanding the application of a technology. This promises a coherent foundation for explaining how we deploy technologies in design, in particular with respect to the affordances they create. By connecting the categorization of technologies to the matching of user effectivities to features of the environment in affordances, the paper proposes an approach to the transparent description of the assemblages produced by design in terms of which technologies are involved and how they connect to each other, to the wider environment and to users. For affordances, this improves specificity concerning the features of the environment that are directly relevant to an interaction and the connections between these features and the rest of the environment. With respect to technologies, it helps understand not only why a technology may be used under certain circumstances but also abuse and underperformance. Finally, it supports design by providing means for parsing complex situations into chains of technologies between animals and environments. This helps explain how technologies modify effectivities, environments or relations between the two and how this affects design performance.
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The present study aims to infer individuals’ social networks from their spatio-temporal behavior acquired via wearable sensors. Previously proposed static network metrics (e.g., centrality measures) cannot capture the complex temporal patterns in dynamic settings (e.g., children’s play in a schoolyard). Moreover, existing temporal metrics overlook the spatial context of interactions. This study aims first to introduce a novel metric on social networks in which both temporal and spatial aspects of the network are considered to unravel the spatio-temporal dynamics of human behavior. This metric can be used to understand how individuals utilize space to access their network, and how individuals are accessible by their network. We evaluate the proposed method on real data to show how the proposed metric impacts performance of a clustering task. Second, this metric is used to interpret interactions in a real-world dataset collected from children playing in a playground. Moreover, by considering spatial features, this metric provides unique knowledge of the spatio-temporal accessibility of individuals in a community, and more clearly captures pairwise accessibility compared with existing temporal metrics. Thus, it can facilitate domain scientists interested in understanding social behavior in the spatio-temporal context. Furthermore, We make our collected dataset publicly available for further research.

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Background: Outdoor social participation in the school playground is crucial for children's socio-emotional and cognitive development. Yet, many children with disabilities in mainstream educational settings are not socially included within their peer group. We examined whether loose-parts-play (LPP), a common and cost-effective intervention that changes the playground play environment to enhance child-led free play, can promote social participation for children with and without disabilities. Method: Forty-two primary school children, out of whom three had hearing loss or autism, were assessed for two baseline and four intervention sessions. We applied a mixed-method design, combining advanced sensors methodology, observations, peer nominations, self-reports, qualitative field notes and an interview with the playground teachers. Results: Findings indicated for all children a decrease during the intervention in social interactions and social play and no change in network centrality. Children without disabilities displayed also an increase in solitude play and in the diversity of interacting partners. Enjoyment of LPP was high for all children, yet children with disabilities did not benefit socially from the intervention and became even more isolated compared with baseline level. Conclusions: Social participation in the schoolyard of children with and without disabilities did not improve during LPP in a mainstream setting. Findings emphasize the need to consider the social needs of children with disabilities when designing playground interventions and to re-think about LPP philosophy and practices to adapt them to inclusive settings and goals.

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Social connectedness at school is crucial to children's development, yet very little is known about the way it has been affected by school closures during COVID-19 pandemic. We compared pre-post lockdown levels of social connectedness at a school playground in forty-three primary school-aged children, using wearable sensors, observations, peer nominations and self-reports. Upon school reopening, findings from sensors and peer nominations indicated increases in children's interaction time, network diversity and network centrality. Group observations indicated a decrease in no-play social interactions and an increase in children's involvement in social play. Explorative analyses did not reveal relations between changes in peer connectedness and pre-lockdown levels of peer connectedness or social contact during the lockdown period. Findings pointed at the role of recess in contributing to children's social well-being and the importance of attending to their social needs upon reopening.

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Detecting and analyzing group behavior from spatio-temporal trajectories is an interesting topic in various domains, such as autonomous driving, urban computing, and social sciences. This paper revisits the group detection problem from spatio-temporal trajectories and proposes “WavenetNRI”, a graph neural network (GNN) based method. The proposed WavenetNRI extends the previously proposed neural relational inference (NRI) method (an unsupervised learning approach for inferring interactions from observational data) in two directions: (1) symmetric edge features and edge updating processes are applied to generate symmetric edge representations corresponding to the symmetric binary group relationships; (2) a gated dilated residual causal convolutional (GD-RCC) block is adopted to capture both short and long dependency of the edge feature sequences. We evaluated the performance of the proposed model on three simulation datasets and three real-world pedestrian datasets, using the Group Mitre metric to measure the quality of the predicted groups. We compared WavenetNRI with four baseline methods, including two clustering-based and two classification-based methods. In these experiments, NRI and WavenetNRI outperformed all other baselines on the group-interaction simulation datasets, while NRI performed slightly better than WavenetNRI. On the pedestrian datasets, the WavenetNRI outperformed other classification-based baselines. However, it did not compete against the clustering-based methods. Our ablation study showed that while both proposed changes cannot be effective at the same time, either of them can improve the performance of the original NRI on one dataset type.

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Social participation at schoolyards is crucial for children’s development. Yet, schoolyard environments contain features that can hinder children’s social participation. In this paper, we empirically examine schoolyards to identify existing obstacles. Traditionally, this type of study requires huge amounts of detailed information about children in a given environment. Collecting such data is exceedingly difficult and expensive. In this study, we present a novel sensor data-driven approach for gathering this information and examining the effect of schoolyard environments on children's behaviours in light of schoolyard affordances and individual effectivities. Sensor data is collected from 150 children at two primary schools, using location trackers, proximity tags, and Multi-Motion receivers to measure locations, face-to-face contacts, and activities. Results show strong potential for this data-driven approach, as it allows collecting data from individuals and their interactions with schoolyard environments, examining the triad of physical, social, and cultural affordances in schoolyards, and identifying factors that significantly impact children's behaviours. Based on this approach, we further obtain better knowledge on the impact of these factors and identify limitations in schoolyard designs, which can inform schools, designers, and policymakers about current problems and practical solutions.

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The book presents a coherent theory of building information, focusing on its representation and management in the digital era. It addresses issues such as the information explosion and the structure of analogue building representations to propose a parsimonious approach to the deployment and utilization of symbolic digital technologies like BIM. It also considers the matching representation of AECO processes in terms of tasks, so as to connect to information processing and support both information management and decision taking.@en

Globally, the challenge of accelerating sustainable transitions to ensure the continued thriving of the human population, natural environment and world economy is well-acknowledged. In the Netherlands ambitious targets have been set to achieve 55% emission reduction when compared to 1990 levels by 2030 and, in line with the European Green Deal, to move towards a climate-neutral society where economic growth is decoupled from environmental degradation and resource use. A key sector that is critical in making this transition is the construction sector. According to the latest Circularity Gap Report, while the construction and maintenance of housing, offices, roads and other infrastructure represent the third largest resource footprint in the Netherlands (at 32 million tonnes), the sector also accounts for the highest level of raw material consumption across all sectors (at nearly 29 million tonnes). Scenarios for creating a more circular construction economy have to date included two main strategies – calls for zero demolition and radical changes in the ways we produce buildings. In this paper, we consider these scenarios and explore the potential for digital technologies to make a difference in developing a more circular construction economy in the future. In what follows, the paper will first present a brief overview of current achievements to introduce circularity in construction. This highlights three key accomplishments, including the drive to document and inventorise building materials that can be recovered, reused and recycled; the development of prototypes, pilots and processes for circularity with a strong focus on designing for deconstruction, and; the creation of knowledge sharing platforms to build a network of actors to take forward lessons learnt on circular building processes. Thereafter, the second part of this paper will focus on identifying the possibilities and current problems faced with using digital technologies to support efforts to create a more circular construction economy.@en

At universities worldwide, the notion of a ‘smart campus’ is becoming increasingly appealing as a response to the multitude of challenges that impact campus development and operation. Smart campus tools are widely used to support students and employees, optimise space use and save energy. Although smart campus tools are supposed to support campus managers in their decision-making processes, the use of the information delivered by smart campus tools and their application in organisational processes has received little attention. In this paper, we focus on the use of dashboards in the connection of IoT information to strategic decision-making processes in the management of university campuses. To this end, we developed a briefing approach for dashboards that expresses the needs of campus management and matches the structure of decision-making processes. In two cases, dashboards based on this approach were use-tested by stakeholders for defining information requirements for IoT applications. The results suggest that users are able to use dashboards for assessing portfolio performance and determining interventions. Through iteration the usability of the dashboard is improved and information requirements are refined, resulting in a brief for a campus management dashboard. The results suggest that the briefing approach can be used to determine IoT information requirements, though further research is required to study indications and contra-indications of the proposed method.

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Purpose: Across the world, many universities are dealing with a pressure on resources, caused by both organisational developments and ageing campuses. Space utilization studies have a strategic role, providing information on how space is being used, thereby informing decisions about the type and scale of facilities that are needed. Design/methodology/approach: This study reports on the space use measurements conducted at TU Delft over the past five years, complemented by their use to make decisions about the university's real estate portfolio. Findings: The education spaces of the university are found to perform well in terms of frequency rates and can be improved in terms of occupancy rates. The information helped to support short- and long-term decision-making. The study places of the university have a satisfactory occupancy in some types of study places, while in others there is room for improvement. More research is needed here to understand the relationship between space norms and space use. Practical implications: The space utilization studies have supported discussions with the student council and decision makers on which interventions are required and which current facilities meet students' needs best. Originality/value: Not much space utilisation studies are reported in the academic literature, and those that do have several limitations. This study may serve as a best practice for benchmarking by other universities and as evidence in other research for the planned and actual use of university facilities.

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The paper examines proposals for nD BIM with respect to what may be considered a dimension and how dimensions relate to information in a symbolic representation. It establishes that ‘dimension’ is often used metaphorically to indicate information-processing capacities – an unfortunate usage in an area where the term is used literally. The paper proposes that a dimension in symbolic building representations should be a primary property of a symbol, not derivative, and moreover essential for the identity of the symbolized object, i.e. not subject to abstraction. On the basis of these principles, it is reasoned that BIM can only be 4D.

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