PLM and architectural rehabilitation : a framework to improve collaboration in the early stages of design

Recent evolutions in French law regarding accessibility of public buildings have prompted a need for methods and tools to rehabilitate such structures in order to make them accessible to disabled users. Architectural rehabilitation is an exceedingly complex design process, in particular, because of a legal framework which strongly impacts on the structure of collaboration, and of the need to take into account the characteristics of existing buildings. In this paper, we describe a participatory design methodology applied in the rehabilitation of a School of Engineering in France in order to improve its accessibility, and describe the basic functionalities of a software tool to assist collaborative engineering in architectural redesign projects.