Level of visualization support for project communication in the Turkish construction industry: a quality function deployment approach

Quality of communication is one of the key factors in the success of the construction projects. Visualization technologies can play an important role in improving the quality of data by encouraging human comprehension rate and increasing the depth of the information delivered. With increasingly available tools, visualization has for some time been identified as one of the major technology themes allowing development of construction process. On the other hand, it is witnessed that visualization has not been embraced as a strategic tool by construction companies and they generally failed in obtaining full advantage of available visualization tools.
This paper aims at evaluating the extent of visualization as a communication tool in construction industry and determining potential benefits to be gained through implementation of visualization. The current state of visualization employment for communication in Turkish architecture, engineering and construction companies is mapped through surveys and interviews. Information flow contents and types are analysed to determine the types of information in the construction process that may benefit from visual representation. According to the priorities of the expectations ranked by the users and the potential of different visualization tools, the level of visualization required for each data flow is determined by a Quality Function Deployment (QFD) based approach.