Abstract
In recent years, many designers and construction manager have demanded more useful information from the voluminous amounts of structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to overcome human limitations in processing this amount of data in a quick turnaround. There is a research question concerning gathering information from the environment and transforming them into an internal context. This study seeks to answer this question by collecting and interpreting data in the same way that designer and construction managers use their senses to interact with the environment around them. Depending on the nature of the data, we classify the environment into four interrelated developmental categories: (1) regulated design environment, (2) human-controlled design environment, (3) static construction environment, and (4) observable and dynamic construction environment. After an introduction in AI and its possibilities for design and construction, the paper focuses on how decisions are made based on the input data in the environments. Last, the common way of interpreting design and construction-related data are described.