1. INTRODUCTION
“Concepts are the glue that holds our mental world
together.” opens Gregory Murphy's (2002) Big Book of Concepts. He continues,
“Concepts are a mental glue, in that they tie our past experiences
to our present interactions with the world, and because the concepts
themselves are connected to our larger knowledge structures.” The
concept addressed in this paper (the concept of concept in architectural
design) tries to do exactly that: to tie past experiences to present
interactions with the world.
Past experiences refers to the time the first author studied
architecture. In her memories, a student's design project could
trigger basically two types of critique from a design teacher: either it
did not have a concept, or the concept was acceptable but it had not been
worked out consistently. Yet, what a concept was, let alone where or how
you could find one, was far from clear. What was clear, however, is that
this elusive concept of concept played a key role in making good
architecture. Glossy architecture magazines were full of articles praising
(or criticizing) the sophisticated (or cheap) concepts of design projects
by world-famous architects. Moreover, later on in the curriculum, the
course on design methodology advocated that the conceptual stage of the
design process is the most influential. Commitments made here have the
largest effects on the resulting building and are the hardest to undo
later. Thus, if one wants to improve design, then conceptual design is
certainly an area with the potential for a high payoff.
Present interactions then refers to a pilot study recently set up to
test a prototype of a design tool. (Not surprisingly, the tool at stake
intends to support architects during the early, conceptual stages of the
design process.) In this study, a professional architect was asked to use
the tool while working on a concrete design assignment. When analyzing the
resulting protocol, it struck us that the architect spontaneously and
candidly talks about a “concept” at various points in the
design session. Utterances like “already the start of a
concept” and “we are probably abandoning the intention of a
toolbox, our concept” strongly suggest that this architect was
effectively working on a concept.
A first attempt to tie these past experiences and present interactions
together is reported in Heylighen and Martin (2004). Based on a “conceptual” analysis of
the protocol and inspired by the connectionist model of interactive
activation and competition (IAC; McClelland & Rumelhart 1985, 1988), the paper
proposed a tentative scheme of the emergence and development of concepts,
which tries to take into account and explain their highly elusive
character. In the first application of this scheme to the design protocol,
however, the concept at stake was presented and analyzed at one specific
point in the design process only. In an attempt to do justice to the
elusive and changing nature of concepts during design, the present paper
applies the scheme at several successive points in the protocol. The
result is a kind of photo shoot of the design concept “under
construction,” which allows us to start appreciating and accounting
for how concepts come and (may) go during design. It is the authors'
hope that, eventually, a more articulate appreciation of this process will
help improve the teaching and learning in the design studio.
In the sections that follow, the basic concepts of concept in
architectural design (Section 2) and of the IAC model (Section 3) are
presented. Based on this foundation, the generation and development of the
concept in the protocol are examined (Section 4), and plans are advanced
for studying the process of concept generation more effectively (Section
5).
2. THE ELUSIVE CONCEPT OF CONCEPT IN
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
Presenting the basic concepts of concept in architectural design
raises a host of difficulties, starting with the meaning of the word
concept itself. To give a precise definition of concept is as
difficult as coming up with a definition of knowledge, which is
inseparably linked to the notion of concept in psychology. The term
concept, as used by Murphy (2002), stands for
“the glue that holds our mental world together”. At first
sight, this does not bring us much further, because, although the
principles involving concept formation and use are thought to be to some
degree generalizable across different domains, the psychology of concepts
cannot by itself provide a full explanation of the concepts of all domains
in which people are interested. By consequence, Murphy's book does
“not explore the psychology of concepts of persons, musical forms,
numbers, physical motions, and political systems,” and we may as
well add design. The details of each of these, Murphy contends, must be
discovered by each of the specific disciplines that study them.
Within the discipline of architecture and, more generally, design,
several architects, design researchers, and critics have given expression
to this notion of concept, without necessarily making explicit mention of
the term. Bryan Lawson openly uses the term concept to convey the
notion of “a very few major dominating ideas which structure the
scheme and around which other relatively minor considerations are
organized” (Lawson, 1994). As less
explicit variations on this theme we can cite the terms primary
generator (Darke, 1978), organising
principle (Rowe, 1987), and “the glue
that holds a solution together” (Kolodner,
1993), a formulation that comes close to the definition of concept
adopted in psychology. Quist, the design tutor in the desk critique made
famous by Donald Schön, speaks about “the major thing”
(Schön, 1983). Still others use the term
parti (Leupen et al., 1997) or
image (Alexander, 1979).
In general, Howard Becker points out, concepts are seldom neutral, but
rather are terms of praise or blame. “Culture,” for instance,
is almost always a good thing, while “bureaucrat” is almost
always bad. “So we care, beyond technical theoretical
considerations, whether we can say that a group has culture or not”
(Becker, 1998). The concept of concept in
architectural design is no exception to this rule. Indeed, most authors do
care whether they can say that a design project has a concept (or whatever
other label they use for it). Interestingly, however, they do not always
agree on whether it is positive or negative. According to Lawson, for
instance, the fact of having a very few dominating ideas is a
characteristic of “good designs” (1994). By contrast, Christopher Alexander (1979) completely dismisses the use of an image as it
would interfere with his design patterns:
Architects sometime say that in order to design a building,
you must have “an image” to start with, so as to give
coherence and order to the whole. But you can never create natural a thing
in this state of mind. If you have an idea—and try to add patterns
to it, the idea controls, distorts, makes artificial, the work which the
patterns themselves are trying to do in your mind. Instead you must start
with nothing in your mind.
Apart from this Babel-like jargon and value conflict, a critical
exploration of the role of concept in architectural design also raises
difficulties of perspective. For although concepts in architecture, as
mentioned above, have been written about by many authors before, the
majority of these writings analyzes and criticizes concepts as end
products of the design process. According to Schön (1963), this tendency comes in large part from our
inclination, with things and thoughts alike, to take an after the fact
view: we tend to understand the business of forming new concepts in a
vocabulary that is appropriate only to their justification after the
fact. By contrast, we would like to understand concepts from the
point of view of the design process itself. In other words, we want to
look at them in a modus operandi as opposed to a modus operatum (Bourdieu, 1977), which is how their generation, as it
unfolds over time, is perceived by an architect working on a design,
instead of how it looks with the hindsight of being finished.
3. THE IAC MODEL IN A NUTSHELL
In the domain of psychology, some cognitive processes like perception,
learning, and memory are explained by connectionism or parallel
distributed processing. Somewhere in between the cognitive theories about
information processing and the neural activities sustaining it, the
essence of connectionism is to model cognitive systems as networks of
nodes connected by (typically weighted and directed) associations or
links. This static representation is complemented by dynamic rules that
govern the short-term interaction between the nodes, and its long-term
effect on the links. This connectionist perspective is inspired by the
organization of the brain, where neurons play the role of nodes, synapses
the role of links, and interaction occurs by the transmission of
electrical activation from neuron to neuron, with a strength proportional
to the “conductivity” of the connecting synapse. Although this
is of course a gross simplification of the actual processes in the brain,
research on artificial neural networks has shown that this approach allows
to successfully model most fundamental cognitive processes (McLeod et al., 1998).
McClelland and Rumelhart (1985, 1988) have begun to explore this parallel distributed
processing approach with IAC mechanisms to model visual word recognition
and the retrieval of general and specific information from stored
knowledge of individual exemplars. The IAC network is a set of processing
units playing a competitive game. The units are organized in pools that
receive excitatory activation through connections (Fig.
1). Each unit activates and is activated by other units. We speak
about interactive processing precisely because of these bidirectional
connections. To maintain a competition between units, however, inhibitory
activation runs between units from the same pool. Thus, the pool's
strongest unit or units quickly lead the competition and drive down the
activation of others. The winner is the most activated unit that models
the recognition in a person's consciousness. Changes in a unit's
activation depend on a function that takes account of the current
activation of the unit as well as the net input from other units and from
the outside world. Units influence one another through the weight of the
connections between them. Those weights are positive or negative,
depending on whether the connection is excitatory or inhibitory. Among the
pools, there are “hidden units” that do not receive activation
from outside the network. All the others units are called “visible
units” because the external world is able to act directly on them
through net input activation.
The interactive activation and competition model. Connections between
units are (· · ·) inhibitory or (—) excitatory.
The activation level of a unit (represented by gray color intensity)
depends on current and received activation.
4. CONCEPT GENERATION IN ACTION
In earlier work, the IAC model was used as a springboard to advance a
scheme of concept generation and development in architectural design
(Heylighen & Martin, 2004). This section
embroiders upon this preceding work to provide a more articulate
perspective on how design concepts come into being. Its main purpose is to
highlight how the scheme proposed accounts for the elusive and changing
nature of concepts during design. A description of the scheme is given
below, prior to applying the scheme to four successive moments in the
design protocol mentioned above.
4.1. Toward a scheme of concept generation and
development
We mentioned that the IAC model was originally meant to model the
retrieval of general and specific information from stored knowledge of
individual exemplars. In a more “imagery” oriented way, we
choose to transpose this model to the context of architectural design,
thereby exploiting the neuronal activation mechanism of human memory
(Churchland & Sejnowski, 1992; Lemaire, 1999). During the design process, architects
refer to places they know (Downing, 2003) or
make analogies with other elements in their memory (Leclercq & Heylighen, 2002). They try to find
something (a concept) to give meaning to their design, or they may search
to represent by building the feeling they want to share with the people,
like artists with their audience.
The common point between these two cognitive phenomena is a memory
system addressed by its content. Designers do not need all properties of
the concept to find it. Incomplete information about its characteristics
is sufficient for designers to be guided in their decisions by an
“elusive concept,” which represents this highly personal
sensation architects feel about their work.
The connectionist scheme of concept generation and development
represents the concept as an active unit, linked to other units by
excitatory or inhibitory connections (Fig. 2).
This very simplified scheme comprises two sets of units: on the one hand,
concept units, the internal representations of the design, and on
the other hand, accessible feature units, the mental images of
shapes, structures, materials, and their connections. All these aspects of
the design are bound through the vehicle of a concept. Thus, although each
feature unit belongs to one domain, a concept unit is based on several
different domains (Gärdenfors, 2004). This
“parti” and its relations with the various mental images are
highly personal and characteristic of each individual designer. Indeed,
the connections between the units arise from the designer's personal
experience and memories. The knowledge of the designer is closely bricked
in the weights of these connections.
The connectionist scheme of concept emergence illustrated with
elements of the think-aloud protocol analyzed in this paper (keywords on
line 47: multifunctional; 214: volume; 226: identity; 244: material; 263:
structure; 508: light; 636: knowledge; 638: toolbox; 644:
concept).
The excitatory connections act upon units among different pools, as
the designer establishes relations between various elements. The
inhibitory connections, on the other hand, affect units within the same
pool and represent opposite knowledge. For instance, when a designer wants
a “massive” structure, this immediately implies that the
structure is not “light”; or when a volume is
“closed,”it is most probably not “open.” Unlike
the originally instance modeling of McClelland and Rumelhart (1985, 1988), however, we do
not restrict all inhibitory connections to units within the same pool. An
architectural construction is a complex object composed of sometimes
contrasting and even contradicting aspects. The emergence of the
architectural concept is precisely what allows rounding up all these
aspects in a single, coherent whole.
The activation of a unit depends on the number and intensity of the
activations received from the other units to which it is connected. When a
concept unit is sufficiently activated, an idea of an overall principle
emerges in the designer's consciousness. Its sufficient activation
will interfere in the choice of other qualities of the design. The feature
units for their part are, in turn, activated by the dominant concept unit
and those close to it. In view of this, the design process can be
described as a sort of competition between concept units that interlards
the design process, whereby the concept unit and its connections can be
thought of as an internal representation of the architectural response or
building solution. This internal representation is necessarily multimodal
(Chandrasekaran, 1999) and maintains many strong
relations with other feature units.
Figure 2 represents the pools of units by
“clouds” to reflect the ill-defined limits of a set. The
representation of the knowledge and its categorization remain an upstream
problem. The aim of this work is to focus only on mechanisms of concept
development and processing. Yet, to explain these mechanisms, we need a
simplified representation of the concepts manipulated by the designer. The
representation of the design problem is not the real environment. It is
just the problem as the designer represents it. As will be shown in the
following section, keyword analysis of a think-aloud protocol allows the
identification of (at least some of) the activated feature units and their
pool. Applying the IAC model to the results of this analysis in turn
allows us to start monitoring the architectural concept's
emergence.
4.2 A photo shoot of a concept under construction
This section applies the proposed scheme to the think-aloud protocol
of an architect designing a school building. Originally, we have
mentioned, this protocol was generated as part of a pilot study to test a
prototype design tool, c.q., an on-line case library for architects (Heylighen & Neuckermans, 2001). To this end, a
professional architect was invited to use the prototype during a 2-h
design session. He was asked for a proposal to reorganize and extend an
architecture school, located in a 16th century castle. The task was to
reorganize and optimize the west wing of the castle (design studios,
lecture rooms, secretariat, photocopy room) and extend it with a reception
hall, material museum, and exhibition room. Small-scale plans of all
floors and pictures of the building were provided.
Apart from having access to the case library, the architect could go
about the design task as he preferred. The design session was limited to 2
h, and the subject was asked to think aloud as he was designing. To help
him become accustomed to thinking aloud, the session was preceded by a
short training exercise. Moreover, once the design session had started,
the architect was encouraged to think aloud if intervals of silence lasted
more than 30 s. During this session, all actions of the architect were
audio- and videotaped. Afterward, the drawings and notes were collected
and numbered chronologically, and the tapes were transcribed. A summary of
this transcription is provided in Table 1.
At first sight, one would expect the situation of an architect testing
a prototype tool to differ considerably from the situation of an architect
designing. However, when having a closer look at the summary of the
protocol transcription, the tool does not seem to have thoroughly affected
the architect's design process, or at least the part of the process
that interests us here. During the first 1.5 h of the design session, the
architect concentrates on understanding the design task and developing a
proposal. It is only at the end of the session, when he has more or less
an idea of what he wants to do, that he consults the case library to look
for relevant structures to realize his idea.1
Note that this does not apply to all protocols generated
within the context of this study. Protocol analysis revealed some
interesting differences between novice and expert designers. Although
novices tend to scan the case library for inspiration on interesting
ideas, experts (such as the subject studied here) rather try to project
their own ideas onto the projects available in the library. In a
comparative analysis, the novice under consideration did not consult the
case library not because he was looking for anything in particular, but to
get inspired by other projects. By contrast, the expert studied here
explicitly looked for concepts related to his design ideas. His search was
more structured in that he tried to match his own ideas with those in the
project collection.
If we applied the proposed scheme of concept generation to the very
beginning of the protocol, that is, before the architect has started
designing, the first snapshot would possibly look like Figure 3. The strength of the connections between
units (shown in the figure by the thickness of the arrows) is determined
by the designer's memories and experiences, and thus likely to be
unique to this particular subject. Suppose, for instance, that our subject
recently visited Myrto and Vitart's Musée des Beaux Arts in
Lille (France). In this case, one may expect a strong connection between
the function of a museum and the concept of a mirror. This first snapshot,
however, is necessarily completely hypothetical, because at this point in
the protocol we have no access to the designer's memories or mind (or
perhaps more correctly, even less so than during the protocol).
A hypothetical snapshot before design starts. A recent visit to Myrto
and Vitart's Musée des Beaux Arts in Lille (France) is likely
to introduce activations of the art unit, the function of a museum, and
the concept of a mirror.
Once the actual protocol has started, we can call in keyword analysis
to identify activated feature units. A first phase covers the time of
comprehending the design task, when the designer reads the program and
examines the plans (keywords on line 37: castle, architecture department;
42: stone; 45: reception, student; 49: exhibition room; 50: material
museum, archive; 62: mill). Subsequently, he enters a second phase of
problem representation, in which he focuses on dimensions and spaces
available (keyword on line 129: open). After approximately 15 min, the
designer switches attention to the identity of the castle (keywords on
line 233: autonomy; 234: contrast; 237: brick; 246: glass; 268: character;
434: massive). As illustrated in the second snapshot (see Fig. 4), all these activities activate multiple
feature units, ranging from functions (e.g., museum) over users (e.g.,
students) to materials (e.g., brick).
At this point, the concept or concepts still appear in a fog. Indeed,
the activation of the feature units propagates in the network and
transfers by multiple connections to the architectural concept units, each
representing a concept defined by a particular combination of features.
The architect's task is now to integrate new functions and new spaces
in the castle, yet the choices available are downright vast. He must
decide on materials, forms, and spaces; but what should he hook these
decisions onto? Where should he start?
Because the architect has little experience with redesigning
historical buildings such as the castle, he cannot readily recycle options
or decisions taken in similar projects before. Consequently, deductive
reasoning is necessarily limited: the designer is unable to build on
generalizations made up beforehand to infer the particular case at stake,
but how can he proceed? Starting from the elements available, he tries to
find common points and, in doing so, to make inductive inferences. Out of
these regularities, the architectural concept emerges in a timid way.
Because the surface area available in the castle cannot accommodate all
spaces listed in the program, the architect decides to extend the west
wing with a new volume between the castle and the neighboring mill (see
Fig. 5).
The new volume between the castle (right) and the mill
(left).
He starts designing the new volume on line 225, and on line 638 (i.e.,
about 10 min later) he suddenly talks about a “toolbox.”
634 what do we get then? so we have above materials museum
and archive space
635 that looks like that as well
636 that it a … a eh storing of
knowledge
638 and the toolbox for the students and
architects
639 and the toolbox is in …
641 and the toolbox are both materials
643 storing of materials and knowledge as the
toolbox
644 a … already the start of a
concept
In some sense, he explains, the materials exhibited in the material
museum and the design knowledge embodied by the archived student projects
can be considered as essential tools for architecture students. If we took
a snapshot at this point, we would see that the connections between the
active feature units (such as museum, archive, knowledge) have triggered
the activation of the toolbox concept unit (see Fig.
6). The term toolbox is a verbal concept that allows the designer
to share his architectural concept, but the conceptual world exceeds the
linguistic world. The feature unit toolbox is a stamp of a mental
picture.
Activation transfer and propagation. The connections between the
active feature units (such as museum, archive, knowledge, material)
trigger the activation of the toolbox concept unit.
Henceforth, a word, an image, thus gathers under a single label of the
totality of the design. As the idea of a toolbox is further developed, the
activation is propagated to various feature units. Each new element to be
integrated by the design must have the characteristics of the whole to
reinforce the parti. In this manner, the concept is gradually consolidated
and sharpened with each new choice made. Reinforcing features include the
functions (archive and material museum), shape (robust and closed), and
material (brick), while at some point in the design process, the choice of
(roof) light is clearly destabilizing. Indeed, at the moment of the fourth
snapshot (Fig. 7), the designer considers giving
up the idea of a toolbox all together, because the two tools within the
box (archive and materials museum) have contradictory daylight
requirements. Therefore, he considers locating the material museum on the
first floor, lit by roof light, and storing the archive away on the ground
level, safely protected from the damaging daylight. Eventually, however,
he decides to cover only half of the first floor with roof light, which
allows him to hang on to the idea of a toolbox.
Considering the use of roof light destabilizes the toolbox
concept.
In this process of concept generation and development, a key role is
played by the designer's sketches. Throughout the design session, the
designer sketches and makes several external representations that validate
or invalidate the toolbox concept. The sketches provide new perceptual
cues and support not only verification but also extraction of
characteristics (Chandrasekaran, 1999). Gabriela
Goldschmidt (1999) speaks in this respect of the
backtalk of self-generated sketches. In the protocol studied, the
designer's sketches supply new stimuli for the feature units in the
model. It is an iterative process that gradually increases the activation
of the concept unit, which in turn, is transferred by all its connections
to other units. The process stops when the design is finished, because no
new fundamental information can modify the architectural concept. The
internal representation is completed, the activation of the concept unit
reaches a maximum, and the transfer of activation is stabilized. The
result is a robust, blind, brick box lifted on top of a glazed volume
(Fig. 8).
The blind, brick, robust toolbox lifted on top of a glazed
volume.
5. DISCUSSION AND FUTURE WORK
Design concepts in architecture typically feature in post hoc
explanations or reviews of finished design projects. By contrast, this
paper has tried to chase a concept during the design process, and shed
more light on when, how, and why it pops up in the designer's
mind.
The very difficulty of answering these questions lies in the
inaccessibility of the designer's thoughts and operations. Only his
features, gestures, and words testify to his inner activity. The words he
uses try to share with us his conscious reasoning, but what about the
unconscious operations to which the designers himself does not have
access? Indeed, the designer's consciousness only has access to a
negligible part of these processes (Damasio,
2000). Thus, the concept and its development within the
designer's mind are his sole property.2
In fact, questions can even be raised about our access to the
reasoning the designer is conscious of: to what extent do his speech acts
really attest to the conscious process in his mind? Although the arguments
for accepting reports of think-aloud exercises as a reflection of
cognitive activity are well documented and substantiated (Ericsson & Simon, 1984), the technique shows
serious disadvantages when applied to design. Because the visual,
nonverbal thinking is fundamental to how designers know and work (Cross, 1982), the verbalization may produce side
effects that change the subjects' behavior and cognitive performance
(Cross et al., 1996). Research in the field of
product design, for instance, has illustrated that protocol analysis, and
the constraint it brings, both theoretically and methodologically,
interferes with designing (Lloyd et al., 1996).
Until we have a more coherent picture of this interference, however, we
can do little more than be very explicit on how our experiment was set up
(Cross et al., 1996). Perhaps worth mentioning
here is that, in everyday life, our subject is used to designing in team
with his design partner and thus to talking while designing. According to
Goldschmidt (1996), thinking aloud and
conversing with others indeed can be seen as similar reflections of the
cognitive processes involved in design thinking.
Deeply anchored
in the body, the concept surfaces through the means of communication at
the designer's disposal. Usually multimodal perceptual
representations are required because concepts in architecture may cover
multiple modalities (
Chandrasekaran, 1999).
Indeed, even if architects, like other designers, heavily rely upon visual
representations like diagrams and sketches, other types of information
(e.g., functional) and thus other modes of representation (e.g.,
kinesthetic) enter the design process as well (
Suwa
& Tversky, 1997). Together, the words, the stories, the images,
the sculptures translate the feelings that push the architect toward his
or her creation.
The connectionist scheme proposed in this paper seems to provide a
useful framework to inventory those parts of the conceptual puzzle we do
have access to and to map the relationships between them. In the protocol
studied, the hidden concept unit is only accessible for us by its name,
that is, toolbox. What we do have access to, however, are the various
feature units, which activate (e.g., the need for an archive and materials
museum), reinforce (e.g., the robust shape or use of brick), or
destabilize (e.g., the roof light) the toolbox concept. Together, these
features and their relationships form a picture, however vague, of when
and how the toolbox concept comes into being.
A question that largely remains unanswered is why the concept of a
toolbox rather than another one pops up. Keeping Schön's (1963) warning in mind, it is, of course, no answer to
say that “toolbox” comes to mind in connection with the new
volume because the new volume, to accommodate the materials museum and
archive, is like a toolbox. We can see after the fact that it is
like a toolbox and like other things as well. The question is why, of the
many things it could come to be conceived as, this one comes to
mind and is singled out. According to Schön (1963), part of the answer to this question has to do
with what is available in our culture. The various concentric and
overlapping cultures we belong to provide the materials from which our
concepts are made. The technology, our social system, and our theories of
the world, are our “given,” our conceptual resources. The
architect in the protocol studied participates, among others, in the
cultures of humanity, the western world, Belgium, and the particular
architecture office in which he works. When looking at the repertoire of
his office, many of the buildings turn out have an explicit boxlike
appearance. Moreover, in the period the experiment was conducted, the
office had just completed a fire station. It is interesting that this
building not only looks like a box but also, according to the
architects' description, it was deliberately conceived as a box,
albeit a Pandora's box instead of a toolbox. Through this frequent
and recent use both as formal articulation and as concept, the notion of
“box” is likely to have been “bricked in” in the
weights of the connections between multiple units before the design
session started, and probably even more so afterwards. In this sense, the
fire station example strongly suggests that the concept of concept indeed
provides almost literally the glue that ties the designer's past
experiences to present interactions with the world.
What the scheme does provide, however, is a plausible answer to the
question why the concept is so elusive in the course of the design
process. While designing, the architect does not yet possess all
ingredients of the project. He has to integrate the elements of the
program, some of which may turn out to be in complete contradiction with
the initial “parti,” thus requiring a reformulation and
sometimes even abandonment of the initial concept. Upon completion of a
design project, however, all elements, including some uncontrolled, are
fixed. Once the design is finished, the inductive inference of the concept
from the overall strategy over the characteristics is much easier, because
the architect highlights only those elements that enabled him to develop
the final concept. The story developed around the concept is thus much
more garnished at the end of the design process because, at this point,
all parts of the puzzle have fallen into place.
Our ability to refine and extend the scheme proposed is a necessary
condition for advancing meaningful implications for design education. A
greater awareness and understanding on the part of design teachers of
their own processes of concept generation is likely to benefit the
teaching methods in the design studio for all students. We understand that
the process of learning design is inevitably fraught with struggles, and
students need to go a long way to get familiar with the design-oriented
ways of thinking. However, through a less tacit studio pedagogy, based on
a more articulate understanding of concept generation, they might learn
design in a more confident and productive way. By the same token, the
scheme might facilitate communication across students and teachers who are
embracing different paradigms, by offering them a common language. Of
course, it would not teach students how to develop design concepts. It
would not take the place of practice, or of the drive to become a
designer. However, it might confirm them in certain directions they have
already tentatively explored, or make them more attentive to certain
things in themselves they would otherwise brush aside as irrelevant. It
might make more understandable and therefore more acceptable to them the
sort of process they find themselves going through.
Before we can even start thinking of this common language, however,
the arena for additional research contributions to the topic addressed in
this paper is virtually limitless, because research attention to how
design concepts come into being has been relatively minimal.
There is a need for a better understanding of what architects mean
when they talk about a design concept. When we began our research, we
found that the current idea of a concept in architectural design is ill
defined, arbitrary, and not based on real knowledge of the process of
design or the perspective of designers. We therefore saw (and still see)
our research problem as not merely to understand how architects
generate and use concepts, or how concepts come into being, but also to
sharpen the definition of what a concept in architectural design
is.
In general, one way of defining a concept is to collect examples of
things we recognize as embodying what the concept refers to and then look
for what the inevitably messy and historically contingent ideas of people
have in common (Becker, 1998). The connectionist
scheme of concept generation and development proposed in this paper does
exactly that: it tries to synthesize what our past experiences related to
design concepts in architecture have in common with the design process of
a professional architect. Because the path of only one architect has been
studied, it is obvious that the scheme is still in embryo. Future research
therefore will confront the preliminary scheme with additional empirical
examples to find more aspects of concepts in architectural design worth
studying and incorporating into our analysis. Indeed, some aspects of this
protocol clearly differ from other protocols generated in the same pilot
study, not to mention protocols generated under completely different
conditions or real-world design processes. Recently, we have recorded and
transcribed four additional design protocols involving a highly
heterogeneous group of subjects, which will be used to further validate
and refine the scheme proposed.
Besides sharpening the definition of design concepts, and trying to
validate the scheme proposed, other research questions to be explored
include (but are not limited to) the following:
- How do long-term memory and short-term memory interact in the
cognitive processes we are trying to understand? And how can the scheme of
concept generation be further developed to accommodate this
interplay?
- Can the scheme, by extension, also account for those cases where the
integrating role, here ascribed to the concept, is played by other
elements, such as a proportional system (Le Corbusier's
Modulor, for instance) or a specific building type? In these
cases, the links between the active units could be thought of as belonging
to the same family, such that the decisions cohere without being
“projected” explicitly onto a specific concept.
- How much do the notion of concept and the process of concept
generation vary across different design disciplines? What can we learn
from these variations and to what extent can the proposed scheme account
for them?
Awaiting the outcome of these research tracks, we put our preliminary
scheme of concept generation and development on the table, so to say, such
that other may learn from it, criticize it, and above all, continue their
own research from which, hopefully, new insights in the role of concepts
during design will emerge.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first author is a postdoctoral fellow of the Fund for Scientific
Research, Flanders, the support of which is gratefully acknowledged. The
second author is supported by the research program WIST-IC&C (contract
03/1/5438) of the Belgian Wallonia Region. The authors thank Jonas
Lindekens, Sam Michiels, and Han Vandevyvere for their invaluable comments
on earlier versions of this text.
