Creative Discovery in Architectural Design Processes: An empirical study of procedural and contextual components

This research aims to collect empirical evidence on the nature of design by investigating the question: What role do procedural activities (where each design step reflects a unit in a linear process) and contextual activities (an action based on the situation, environment and affordances) play in the generation of creative insights, critical moves, and the formation of design concepts in the reasoning process? The thesis shows how these activities can be identified through the structure of a linkograph, for better understanding the conditions under which creativity and innovation take place. Adopting a mixed methodology, a deductive approach evaluates the existing models that aim to capture the series of design events, while an inductive approach collects data and ethnographic observations for an empirical study of architectural design experiments based on structured and unstructured briefs. A joint approach of quantitative and qualitative analyses is developed to detect the role of evolving actions and structural units of reasoning, particularly the occurrence of creative insights (‘eureka’ and ‘aha!’ moments) in the formation of concepts by judging the gradual transformation of mental imagery and external representations in the sketching process. The findings of this research are: (1) For any design process procedural components are subsets in solving the design problem for synchronic concept development or implementation of the predefined conceptual idea, whereas contextual components relate to a comprehensive view to solve the design problem through concept synthesis of back- and forelinking between the diachronic stages of the design process. (2) This study introduces a new method of looking at evolving design moves and critical actions by considering the time of emergence in the structure of the reasoning process. Directed linkography compares two different situations: the first is synchronous, looking at relations back to preceding events, and the second is diachronic, looking at the design state after completion. Accordingly, creative insights can be categorised into those emerging in incremental reasoning to reframe the solution, and sudden mental insights emerging in non-incremental reasoning to restructure the design problem and reformulate the entire design configuration. (3) Two architectural designing styles are identified: some architects define the design concept early, set goals and persevere in framing and reframing this until the end, whereas others initiate the concept by designing independent conceptual elements and then proceed to form syntheses for the design configuration. Sudden mental insights are most likely to emerge from the unexpected combination of synthesis, particularly in the latter style. In its contribution to design research and creative cognition this dissertation paves the way for a better understanding of the role of reflective practices in design creativity and cognitive processes and presents new insights into what it means to think and design as an architect

Directed Linkography and Syntactic Analysis: Comparing Synchronous and Diachronic Effects of Sudden Emergence of Creative Insights on the Structure of the Design Process

This paper reports on a study of the emergence of creative insights in the architectural design process. Using detailed ethnographic observations of designers working on an architectural design task, and coding these using linkographs, we identify two poles of design creativity: incremental improvement and the sudden creative insight. We show how these can be identified in the structure of the linkograph, giving rise to the possibility of better understanding the conditions under which creativity and innovation take place. Linkography is directed in relation to the time of emergence of design utterances. It is characterised as a pivotal structure of a multi-level hierarchical network. A quantitative model is proposed to capture the structure of events and sudden changes occurring in the design process using syntactic measures of space syntax and urban graphs. Two situations are compared: synchronous designing using ‘directed linkography’ looking at the backlink relations and the completed state of the linkograph. Local, global measurements and directed j-graphs are correlated with design contents and descriptions for the concept development. Our interest lies in capturing events of drastic changes and investigating the transformation of the associated interim products. Such events are hypothesised, reflecting significant transformation in concept reasoning and the configuration of the linkograph. Through this model, we aim to answer the question: why would sudden insights divert the network to a different structure state

Order, Structure and Disorder in Space Syntax and Linkography: Intelligibility, Entropy, and Complexity Measures

There has been great interest in the use of linkographies to describe the events that take place in design processes with the aim of understanding when creativity takes place and the conditions under which creative moments emerge in the design. Linkography is a directed graph network and because of this it gives resemblance to the types of large complex graphs that are used in the space syntax community to describe urban systems. In this paper, we investigate the applications of certain measures that come from space syntax analyses of urban graphs to look at linkography systems. One hypothesis is that complexity is created in different scales in the graph system from the local sub-graph to the whole system. The method of analysis illustrates the underlying state of any system. Integration, complexity and entropy values are measured at each individual node in the system to arrive at a better understanding on the rules that frame the relationships between the parts and the whole