Why should the construction industry be interested in situational awareness (SA) in building design management (BDM)? BDM is a complex, dynamic, and collaborative process (Pikas et al., 2022). A lack of SA of what is happening around the design manager (DMR) or design team, and a lack of understanding of the impact of events and the potential consequences, tend to worsen project performance, collaboration, and customer satisfaction (Adamu et al., 2015; Martinez et al., 2023). SA is a data-driven decision-support concept that enables individuals and groups to understand what is happening and to anticipate future events based on collected data and understanding (Endsley, 2015). BDM as a function requires decisions, so exploring a decision-support concept such as situational awareness in the context of BDM is a relevant line of study. Many researchers and practitioners have shared the necessity of improving the transparency of the building design (BD) process, and SA offers one possible approach that has been tested in numerous fields (Ofte and Katsikas, 2022). To date, however, situational awareness has not been applied to BDM work. To enable further development of situational awareness in BDM, this paper first explores the issues behind the decision-making of design managers (DMRs).

Building design is unique creative work that is tailored to a client’s needs (Lawson, 2006). Due to BD’s iterative nature, it often conflicts with production (Nwajei, 2021). BD is a progressive and iterative process carried out by interdisciplinary teams (Steele et al., 2000), and a specific problem’s design solution is rarely discovered on the first attempt (Lawson, 2006). Most of the time, a solution is sought by trying many different options and interacting with several parties, meaning that BD is difficult to observe and monitor (Viles et al., 2020). The complexity of BD is related to both the design problem and the multiple parties involved in the design (Boyd and Bentley, 2012).

The role of building design management is to lead this unique, complex, collaborative, interdisciplinary, and iterative creative human process (Gray and Hughes, 2001; Lawson, 2006; Lopez et al., 2010). BDM is a prerequisite for successful construction projects. Modern BDM involves interaction and collaboration between individual experts using digital systems, such as building information models (BIMs). Despite the use of digital aids, BDM still relies on traditional methods, such as design reviews, verbal enquiries, commenting, and progress reporting (Winch et al., 1998; Gerbov et al., 2018; Pikas et al., 2020). The DMR’s key responsibilities are building a design team (or group in bigger projects), ensuring team spirit, organizing the designers’ work and conditions, supporting the designers’ work, and making decisions about design issues (Bertelsen, 2004). The DMR’s work comprises many different areas, mixing both modern technology and traditional management.

The situational awareness concept has recently been proposed as a possible solution to shift this manual tradition of BDM toward a more holistic use of real-time digital design information (Sacks et al., 2020; Martinez et al., 2023). SA is rooted in decision-making in complex and collaborative dynamic systems. The concept refers to a person’s or group’s perception of a situation, constrained by human working memory and perceptual limitations (Endsley, 1995). Researchers have proposed several views of SA; the most common type includes three levels: 1) perception of the current situation, 2) understanding of the current situation, and 3) prediction (Salmon et al., 2017). SA has the advantage of reducing uncertainty and ambiguity in dynamic and complex systems through a systematic concept. The SA concept is gaining interest, and several sub-solutions and complete SA systems have been developed and used in different projects to support project management (PM), although SA has not been applied to design managers’ work or decision-making in building design management (Lappalainen et al., 2021). The objective of this study is thus to examine DMRs’ decision-making processes to comprehend how situational awareness is demonstrated in the decision-making process of BDM. The research question we are investigating is as follows: How does SA manifest in DMRs’ decision-making processes?

This study’s research approach and argument are reversed: in order to study situational awareness in BDM, we first must assess what decisions DMRs make and, while studying this information, to develop a concept (and possibly later a system) for building design that applies situational awareness. This paper first provides a brief overview of BDM and situational awareness. After describing the methods, we present the findings of the thematic analysis and conceptualize a proposal for situational awareness in BDM. After providing a discussion and examining the relevant literature, we present our findings before concluding the paper.

To explore decision-making in building design management from the design manager’s perspective, a group of BDM experts were approached to explore their views on this topic. Interviewing experts is an effective method for data collection, especially if the experts have relevant and specific knowledge of a topic and are representative actors of a larger group (Bogner et al., 2009). People with experience in BDM were selected to participate in the study as part of a research consortium between Finnish construction industry actors and academia (a consortium described in Lavikka et al., 2020). At the time of the study, the consortium had 21 member companies, of which 36 experts participated in the workshop. The group was formed from various consortium members, who were selected by the consortium member companies for their building design process and design management expertise.

Nine interviews with DMRs and one remotely facilitated expert workshop were organized. The interviews and workshop were held remotely via video conference (due to COVID-19 restrictions) over an eight-month period. The workshop took place in November 2020, and the interviews were conducted between March 2021 and September 2021. Seven interviewees were volunteers who participated in the workshop and indicated to the researchers their willingness to be interviewed after the workshop. Two interviewees were not employees of the consortium companies and did not attend the workshop; they were from organizations that the researchers had contacts with from previous research projects. Three of the interviewees were women, and six were men. All were experienced DMRs. Table 2 shows the details of the sessions and the interviewees.

The expert group was approached directly with the research questions drafted by the main author and one co-author. The experts were divided into seven groups of six members during the workshop, in which they addressed the interview questions. The groups were randomized by using the feature of the digital video conferencing platform used in the workshop (Microsoft Teams) to randomly assign participants to groups. The expert groups presented their views as a summary through the spokespersons of each group, followed by a short discussion between the researchers and the group to ensure the interpretation of the answers. One-to-one interviews were conducted by the main author using open-ended interviews with a few “probing” questions that focused the interview on design management (Neuert et al., 2021); the aim was to pursue a broader range of individual DMRs’ views and their rationales. The interviews and the expert workshop were recorded and transcribed. The quotes in this paper have been edited for clarity in English. Notes were also taken by the researchers during the sessions.

Data were post-processed using the Atlas.ti 9.0 software and the electronic whiteboard software Miro. Post-processing and data analysis were carried out using thematic analysis. This approach is suitable for searching for inductively new information based on and led by the research data in the study, in this case the interviews. Thematic analysis is a qualitative method of analysis and a form of content analysis that requires the researcher to interpret the data (Guest et al., 2012). The use of a systematic analysis method and careful coding enabled the researchers to move back and forth between the themes and the original expressions by the interviewees. The conclusions we drew from the data can thus be examined throughout the process without losing the original expressions, and the research data can be reliably stored.

The analysis phase focused on identifying themes related to building design management expressed by the BDM experts. During the first phase of the analysis, the transcribed interviews were reviewed word by word (however, the words were not counted) and sentence by sentence in detail (during the familiarizing oneself with the data step); at the same time, the data were coded with post-processing software. During the coding phase (searching for themes), codes were developed for the quotations and expressions (defining and naming themes), which were textual descriptions of the identified themes (Neuendorf, 2018). The open codes were sentence-long summaries of what the experts said during the interviews and the workshop about BDM and decision-making.

A total of 368 open codes were generated in the analysis. For example, the citation “But then if you have to make those decisions with incomplete information … and sometimes you have to make them to move things forward” (Code ID 2:57 by Interviewee D8) was summarized as a code: “The DMR must make decisions with incomplete information.” These individual codes were then summarized by combining concepts with similar meanings into themes. Themes emerged as code groups by logical induction, linking codes by following the connections between the codes.

During the next phase, the researchers reviewed, refined, and rationalized the themes (defining the main themes). The main themes were identified through the connections between themes composed of codes: the number of identifiable relationships between themes guided us to the main theme and enabled it to be described. If few or no relationships existed, then the themes did not emerge as main themes. Finally, an integrative synthesis and conceptual clusters were created based on the themes induced by expert expressions of design management and the literature. The researchers collaborated in group to evaluate the interrelations and significances of the themes, subsequently employing a visual mind-mapping tool (Miro software) to illustrate the clusters and thematic links. The coherence of the created patterns was evaluated by the researchers, and the alignment of these patterns with insights derived from interviews and the literature review was examined. This repeated procedure culminated in the development of the final figures.

The principles of axial and selective coding to construct the framework were utilized (Vollstedt and Rezat, 2019). This procedure occurred prior to the final diagram in the figure, where various themes within the clusters were interconnected by lines, resulting in the formation of groups with shared characteristics. From these interrelated topics, a summary, referred to as a cluster, was constructed. A cluster essentially represents a synthesis of interconnected ideas, addressing the question of their collective significance. The definition of clusters was constrained by the necessity for the summary to be pertinent to the study problem. Given that the descriptor linked by dashes more accurately represented the research process, we opted to eliminate the dashes and present the clusters and themes without them. The proposition was derived from the same graph featuring connecting arrows, but we streamlined this graph by restricting the topics to the situational awareness concept. Both descriptions stem from interconnected themes, initially perceived as clusters and subsequently as propositions aligned with the situational awareness concept. The employed technique enforces selectivity, prioritizing variables and elucidating the linkages among them (Miles et al., 2014; Ravitch and Riggan, 2016). The aim of the synthesis was to present empirical findings on DMRs’ decision-making and to link the findings (through cluster view and concept view) to previous research literature for conceptualizing the proposal of situational awareness in design management.

Table 3 shows the code groups we identified, the number of open codes they contained, and sample quotes for each code group. The top of the table includes the code groups with the most open codes, while the code groups at the bottom have the fewest codes. Themes in bold in the table represent the code groups from which the main themes were drawn.

Table 4 presents 11 inductively formulated and refined main themes. The number of open codes linked to the main theme is shown on the right side of the table.

Clusters formed by the distinct implications between the main themes are presented in Figure 1. In the figure, the first four main themes of BDM form four clusters related to the research question: 1) findings affecting the DMRs’ decision-making ability, 2) findings related to aspects of DMRs’ management of building design work, 3) findings related to the role of the DMRs, and 4) findings related to the decision-making of the DMRs.

Figure 1 reflects several important findings from the interviews. First, the results of the interviews suggest that the DMRs’ role changes during the project; at the same time, the balance of decision-making power changes. For example, one interviewee described how such a role “drifts”: first, during the design phase, the role and decision-making power of the DMR is held by a representative of the design team (often the lead designer), but starting with the procurement phase, the role may shift to the construction consultant and, as the site starts, increasingly to the site organization. Second, this study revealed another finding related to the constraints on decision-making power among DMRs: they rarely make major decisions alone or with designers. Instead, decision proposals are typically prepared with the assistance of experts and presented to a client, who then makes the final decision. Third, we asked probing questions during the open interviews, one of which was related to the education and training the building design managers had undergone for their role (see Tables 3, 4; Figure 1). Their answers varied, although most respondents expressed that they had not received much training specifically related to BDM; they had mainly learned their skills in BDM on the job.

Based on the interviews and literature review, the concept of the situational awareness of building design management is structured around four main clusters, including findings related to (1) DMRs’ decision-making abilities, (2) aspects of DMRs’ management of building design work, (3) DMRs’ role, and (4) DMRs’ decision-making. The proposed concept combines Endsley’s (1995) tripartite structure with various distinct features related to DMRs’ decision-making, highlighted both in the literature and in the interviews, especially the client’s role in decision-making, decision-making based on uncertainty, DMRs’ changing roles during projects, and information and support for decision-making produced by designers.

The research literature supports these clusters and related themes derived from the interview data. In particular, the changing nature of the role, variations in decision-making power (either due to the stage of the project or the client), the client’s ultimate decision-making power, and pressure to make decisions without sufficient information have also been noted in previous research; these phenomena were incorporated into the conceptual framework. In line with previous concepts based (for example) on an information manager (Kärkkäinen et al., 2019) and partial solutions based on technological methods (Lappalainen et al., 2021), the proposed concept in the present study was created based on interviews with experienced DMRs and research literature related to decision-making in building design management.

The three stages according to Endsley’s (1995) situational awareness concept—perception, comprehension, and projection—are illustrated in Figure 2. The design process is the first stage; perception relates to the information obtained from the design process, which we describe as different potential measurable indices known from previous research and practice (e.g., Tribelsky and Sacks, 2010; Uusitalo et al., 2021). The second stage of SA (comprehension) includes the BDM decision-making and the main themes that support those decisions. In the proposed model, the situational awareness of BDM is created from four characteristics related to BDM decision-making: 1) decision-making with insufficient information, 2) decision permanence, 3) the timeliness of decision-making, and 4) proposals subordinated to the customer’s decision-making. The right side of the figure shows four potential indices, which could serve as key metrics for decision-making in building design management by expressing the status of decision-making in that field. The concept has a typical feedback loop as an essential element, which in this proposal is connected from the design manager to the designers. Nothing prevents connecting a similar feedback loop from the DMR’s decision-making to the construction site or the client as well, however, as proposed by Pikas (2019). The projection stage, located in the lower part of the figure, is supported by decisions from DMRs and clients, as well as analytics and forecasts associated with the design work.

The indices shown in Figure 2 are based on methods presented in previous research and in practice; for example, various questionnaires have been used to measure the social domain of building design work, including collaboration, communication, trust, and team chemistry (Thomson et al., 2009; Chiocchio et al., 2011; Uusitalo et al., 2021). The analytics and use cases of the technical domain have been described by Sacks et al. (2020), Tribelsky and Sacks (2010), Petrova et al. (2019), Lappalainen et al. (2022), and Kenley and Seppänen (2009), among others. Nassar and AbouRizk (2014) have proposed an integrated model of these indices, while Guillemette et al. (2014) and Wen et al. (2018) have developed indices related to decision-making.

The role of the BDM can be described in terms of an expert-manager-user triangle, as described by Cairns and Beech (1999): the DMR role is a facilitating messenger between the client and the experts. The emphasis on communication alone in BDM can be a mistake, however, because the differences in power relations and knowledge vary among these three roles (Cairns and Beech, 1999). In this study, the informants were from one country, and their opinions were influenced by the local model of building and construction, where the construction management consultant typically has a strong role as a design lead. On the other hand, Al Nahyan et al. (2019) have observed a similar change in the balance of power that varies during a construction project and the effects on management, communication, coordination, and information sharing; this phenomenon seems not to be country- or market-specific. Changing roles and alterations in decision-making power and proposal-based decision-making processes require the adoption and acceptance of varying management styles at different phases of the project. This scenario is also noteworthy for situational awareness in BDM: changing roles and people and alterations in power structures should be considered in a different way than in static role-based environments where SA is used (e.g., aviation, energy production) and cannot be ignored when the applicability of the concept of SA is being considered for wider use in the construction industry.

A significant part of problem-solving for building design experts is using experience and knowledge in their day-to-day work; experience enables the search for knowledge about the problem at hand and allows people to generate a limited set of alternatives or hypotheses rather than spending time and energy trying to work out detailed clues. This strategy is what distinguishes novices from more experienced BD experts (Orasanu and Connolly, 1993). This interesting finding of DMRs’ experience-based learning is consistent with work by Emmitt (2016), who has stated that qualification for BDM does not occur through education but rather is a skill acquired through the experience of designers. Workplace-based practical learning focuses on work-related tasks, and the experience gained from such learning is context-bound and contains situation-specific tacit information (Tynjälä, 2008). This finding is relevant in the possible deployment of the situational awareness concept in building design management; the skills of each DMR are based on experience and work context. Therefore, difficulties may be expected in developing a generic solution of situational awareness for BDM.

If the decision-makers and their roles change in BDM, if their decision-making authority varies, and if their experience and expertise vary, then several impediments may arise to the situational awareness concept supporting DMRs’ decision-making. This paper highlights this turnover of roles and the variation of expertise, experience, and decision-making authority during the project, recognizing these factors and the information behind the concept. The situational awareness in BDM may therefore stay constant, even if the DMR changes from a designer to a representative of a construction company. The decision-making support the designers provide to the DMR, which is essential for the latter’s decision-making, can be adjusted according to the person’s experience and expertise. Of course, doing so requires functional social cooperation between the parties, which, in the proposed model, can be measured and monitored with the help of various social domain indices.

DMRs typically make decisions under time pressure, under the “progressing despite the difficulties” mentality. Van der Meer et al. (2020) relate this idea to the characteristic of the process-based approach of decision-making, noting the difficulty of forming a problem state that will reflect all the possible results that can follow from a given decision, the achievement of the goals, the contingencies of the decision and the result, and the probability of different results. Decision-makers therefore often choose the best decision as an alternative that they estimate will have the greatest chance of achieving their goals. Alternatively, the contradictory expressions of DMRs’ time pressure and slow decision-making may also be affected by the fact that the design process varies by building type and design field; decisions that people make in the early stages of the process often lack support from sufficient evidence. The designers may later notice that the assumptions they presented at the beginning of the process do not reflect the customer’s requirements and thus end up wasting time and effort during these phases (Stanitsa et al., 2022). The use of such an index of decision timeliness or decision delay could potentially reduce the time pressure faced by DMRs, which, in worst-case scenarios, could also lead to decisions that must be changed later in the project.

For decision-makers who often make decisions from practical experience based on insufficient information, SA can be biased. This “quick and dirty” or intuitive decision-making is widely used because decision models related to solving complex problems require more time and effort to be applied. The uniqueness of a project can lead to a lack of reference points for an alternative decision; during project work, making a timely decision is often more practical than spending time optimizing decisions (Wen et al., 2018). The use of such quick and efficient decision-making may also show the difference between an experienced expert and a novice (Orasanu and Connolly, 1993). But previous experiences can influence future decisions, especially when something positive has resulted from a previous decision; people tend to decide in the same way in seemingly similar situations (Juliusson et al., 2005). DMRs’ decision-making, which is strongly based on previous experience, is also a challenge from the point of view of the situational awareness concept because nothing prevents people from “jumping” over different levels of SA (Salmon et al., 2017). Similarly, an experienced DMR could observe the design situation and remember an earlier event and decide to proceed in this situation in accordance with previous experience; the DMR could in practice jump over the comprehension and projection steps to the direct decision-making step. This phenomenon should be considered when studying the possibilities of SA in design. In the proposed concept of situational awareness in BDM, intuitive decision-making involves deciding things based on uncertain information, for which we propose various indices related to the quality and stability of decision-making.

Due to the uncertain nature of the building design process, DMRs must ensure that designers understand each other. Doing so is not straightforward or standardized, as the design team is made up of personalities and individual experiences. A lack of understanding of this issue often leads to confusion and misunderstood expectations between the design team and the client; DMRs need processes to identify and manage moods and various soft factors (Tvedt and Dyb, 2019).

Due to the complexity of building design processes, in addition to the results of design activities, the focus must be on the relationships between designers. The building design process itself is the joint result of the collaboration developed by the designers during the design phase (Girard and Robin, 2006), although collaboration efforts often focus on the phase’s technological side, with limited focus on the soft side (Idi and Khaidzir, 2018). On the soft side of decision-making, facts, information, experience, beliefs, intuition, and prejudice are combined in order for people to make a choice among different options (Bakht and El-Diraby, 2015). The proposed SA concept for building design management thus should include the soft and social factors of such management.

The proposed SA concept we have set out in this study is a technology-independent conceptual framework in which the indicators and data sources we have presented are mostly well known and studied in the construction sector and beyond. The framework can serve as a catalyst for future construction projects where SA systems are intended to be adopted at the design phase. Such applications will require further research, validation, and identification of potential weaknesses of the framework in the real world, which this exploratory study does not cover.

The aim of this study was to explore decision-making in building design management (BDM) from the design manager (DMR) perspective; we then aimed to use the findings for the situational awareness (SA) concept and to assess the model’s potential usefulness in BDM. Specifically, we aimed to address the research question: How does SA manifest in DMRs’ decision-making processes? We sought answers from the literature, an expert workshop, and nine open-ended interviews. We analyzed the data using the thematic analysis method, then summarized the main themes to describe the expressions related to DMRs’ decision-making. Finally, we set out an inductive proposal for a concept that presents the possible use of situational awareness in BDM. The key findings of DMRs’ roles and decision-making are as follows:

1. The DMR role can be played by several people in the same project.

Especially for developers of SA systems, these findings are essential, since the development of systems into BDM requires the definition of requirements. Based on our findings, these requirements should be requested from several different people in different organizations, and the system should also be able to react to changes in decision-making power over time. This topic is an interesting subject for further research.

The findings can also be interpreted as encouraging in terms of the use of situational awareness in BDM. DMRs often make decisions based on insufficient information. The utilization of SA concepts in other fields is based on the use and interpretation of data and data-based forecasting. We thus may assume that a situational awareness system (which could be developed by considering the special characteristics of BDM) could facilitate the work of DMRs and improve their decision-making by improving the quality of the information underlying decisions, thus also reducing previous experience-related biases related to decision-making.

This study does has several limitations, however. First, thematic content analysis has certain methodological limitations. In particular, the researchers’ role as producers of understanding as an instrument limits reliability (Neuendorf, 2018). In this study, our strategy to mitigate such single-perspective bias was to involve several researchers who reviewed and criticized conclusions drawn from the research data. The authors have also attempted to present detailed evidence from the interviews and workshop within the limits allowed by the length of the paper so that readers may evaluate our conclusions, including their validity and reliability.

Another limitation is related to the number informants and their geographical location in one country, which limits their circle of experience to one country and one building culture. The authors are aware of this limitation related to the reliability and generalizability of the research, but we have striven to mitigate this bias by comparing the empirical results with those of the international research literature. In qualitative research such as this paper, a sample size of 45 respondents is very modest; yet, it aligns closely with the recommended range of 20–50 respondents established by other scholars (Marshall et al., 2013), which can be seen in a saturation of responses as the study progressed.

Because the findings also relate to commonly known themes in BDM such as concept making, collaboration, communication, trust, and team chemistry, the study’s contribution is independent of geography. Nevertheless, this bias is significant, and further research will be necessary to validate the proposed concept and to ensure that our proposals are sound. A third limitation is the qualitative approach we chose for the study due to its exploratory nature. While researchers have extensively studied decision-making by using quantitative methods, our literature review did not reveal any studies that have focused on DMRs’ decision-making or decision-making in BDM. Further quantitative investigations are therefore needed; this study may assist in guiding future quantitative research directions.