| dc.description.abstract | At the frontline of construction activities, work crews must rely on working drawings/shop drawings as the means of communication, among them or within each of them. Upon the use of drawings as a communication tool, oral communications are also inevitably essential. This conventional communication approach may seem typical and natural, but it creates substantial “noise” in many aspects of technical and non-technical communication. Errors, confusions, incompletions in communication results in rework, slow pace, repetition and loss of morale in construction. These all amount to great loss of construction productivity.
This study commences with an innovative concept of communication by using symbols, numbers, and coloring for forming the technical elements of work order and planning. The purpose is to removing the need of oral communication outright, and commands a near-automatic assembly on site. The pre-requisite of this concept requires a re-thinking of construction planning, and doing away all decision making for work crews on site. This study centers on formwork construction in contemplating this possibility.
The results of this study include a set of coding, which includes mostly symbols and numbers to be marked on each piece of the wooden form. The coding on each piece of wooden form is essentially the instructions to the crew with regards to how and where the form should be placed, the logical sequencing of the preceding forms, the orientation of the form, where and how the form should be placed once dismantled, and the like.
This set of coding was tested to a group of non-technical interviewees, in order to understand how heuristic and easy to comprehend on the site. The test points to a successful outcome. The contribution of this study includes the production of a set of heuristic coding which has the potential to replace the need for oral communication in formwork construction on site; and this innovation approach may enable non-technical workers to conduct more complex tasks, thus reducing the need for expensive and short supply technical workers.
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