Ebook: Design Processes

This book is a result of cooperation between the Faculties Industrial Design Engineering and Architecture of Delft University of Technology. It presents the content of a series of papers presented at the first joint conference on Design Processes.

This conference was organized in a special timeframe. On the 13th of may the Faculty of Architecture burned down. A few weeks later important part of the staff of Architecture had moved in the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering which might have a greater impact on the cooperation than the conference itself. Directly discussions between scientists from both faculties started about possibilities for cooperation.

Nevertheless this confernce and this book mark an important moment in the 40 year history after Industrial Design Engineering sprouted from the Faculty of Architecture.

Also on behalf of the dean of the Faculty of Architecture, professor Wytze Patijn, I thank the reviewers professor Arthur O. Eger and professor Jos Lichtenberg for the effort they did for improving the scientific quality of these papers. I also thank professor Wim Poelman and professor David Keyson for editing this book.

Professor Cees de Bont, Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering

Background; Preliminary Investigation; The cases; The subtitle

In order to speak about the commonalities and differences between industrial and architectural design, wee need a common framework that may capture both design fields. Practise-based descriptions have a long tradition, and are close to everyday reality of the fields, but they are too specific. The scientific study of design – design research – is a more recent development, which aims accurately to provide this framework. We discuss the current understanding of design, its limitations, and some observations related to the cases of the IDE+A Conference.

The different modes of visualisation found in the Delft Interviews are explored with respect to their particular advantages at specific phases of the design process, and as a means of communicating with various project stakeholders. Two main conclusions arise from this exploration. First, that with few exceptions there are no significant differences between architects and industrial designers in the way they produce and use visuals. Second, despite the proliferation of potent digital visualisation means and their willing adaptation by design practitioners, freehand sketching continues to be practised by almost all designers throughout the design process. The extraordinary cognitive advantages of sketching are outlined and it is argued that because of those advantages sketching will continue to reign in design until other means of visualisation will be capable of emulating its supremacy.

This paper describes the ways in which factors of project environments determine the application of management concepts, particularly risk management, in industrial design engineering (IDE) and architectural projects. The paper is based on a set of eight design cases prepared for the IDE+A conference. Given the limited number of cases and the constraints imposed by the overall case study design, it was necessary to supplement the insight derived from the cases with a review of generally accepted accounts of the design process in IDE and architecture. By sorting the cases according to the emergent dimensions of internal vs. external project and market- vs. client-driven and comparing the applications of project management concepts in each case, we will find that the environmental factors provide a clearer picture of how and why different project management concepts are applied than do the disciplinary factors. Indeed, by focusing on the project environment factors we may be in a better position to predict project management approaches will be required in design-build or other unusual or innovative project organisations. innovative project organisations.

This chapter focuses on the causes and consequences of enhanced complexity of design activities by the social context. The eight design projects, which were used as stimulating material, were analysed towards the variables which contributed to the social context. All interviewees discussed collaboration between different stakeholders as one of the main ambiguous issues in the design process. In the paper the challenges of the three problems prevalent in most projects are analysed in further detail: unshared or contradictory goals between different stakeholders involved in the process, the need for crocc-disciplinary communication and the uniqueness of the projects. Finally, two concepts are presented and further detailed in how they may provide opportunities of influencing these complex social processes in a desired direction.

Introduction; 1 Decision making in an architectural design process; 2 The Sjoelbak game: a decision-based design situation explained; 3 Decision-based design by means of the combination of sub-solutions; 4 A general phase model for the combination of sub-solutions; 5 Decision making in the combination process; 6 Management of the combination process; 7 A case study: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; 7.1 Project history; 7.2 Description of original single-input tool; 7.3 Description of multi-stakeholder tool; 8 The measurement and addition of stakeholder preferences; 8.1 Boolean and tri-valued veto preferences; 8.2 Multi-valued relative preferences; 8.3 Implementing a limited veto and relative preference system; 9 Conclusion; References

Introduction; 1 Technology diffusion and design processes; 1.1 The cases; 2 Design as information processing; 2.1 Supply of and demand for information; 2.3 Towards a new paradigm for the knowledge-diffusion process; Discussion; References