Circular Immersive Parametric Design Workflow for Sustainable Construction Materials Development

Universities can play an essential role in educating students on Building and Information Modelling before they enter the construction industry. Educating students is related to technological constraints against which researchers and BIM providers face as they accelerate the process of compatibility and data exchange in BIM workflows. Revit is a leading BIM platform and works with Enscape, Unity, and other software for translation. Subsequently, virtual environments have been implemented successfully in residential and commercial projects However, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the potential for BIM and virtual reality (VR) are still unexploited for the realization of construction projects. The use of new technologies could increase the willingness of construction professionals to use BIM. This paper presents an innovative workflow towards sustainable construction material application through VRenabled BIM for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries towards improving circularity. Students applied BIM and VR in a Building Design course.

Therefore, this study introduces a workflow for circular immersive parametric design (CIPaDe). The CIPaDe Workflow includes stages of 1) material selection for load-bearing and non-loadbearing elements 2) geometry exploration and 3) unit and systems design applying modular design, design for disassembly, and design for deconstruction principles. There is sufficient evidence that the use of BIM and VR in AEC education environments is desirable and beneficial. The proposed CIPaDe, BIM-intoVR-based workflow is expected to improve students’ learning performance, provide an environment similar to the real world, increase the visualization of models before they were built, and enhance their creativity.