Morphological analysis of C-Kâs C-constructs on design group creativity
Year: 2013
Editor: John Lawlor, Ger Reilly, Robert Simpson, Michael Ring, Ahmed Kovacevic, Mark McGrath, William Ion, David Tormey, Erik Bohemia, Chris McMahon, Brian Parkinson
Author: Zeiler, Wim
Series: E&PDE
Institution: TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Section: Creativity
Page(s): 102-107
ISBN: 978-1-904670-42-1
Abstract
The design of buildings is complex and requires the support of multi-disciplinary design teams. Therefore a supportive design approach has been developed; Integral Design. The Integral design method, with its use of morphological overviews in combination with the C-K theoretical focus on concept generation is an important step to reach true collaborative building design. The approach was tested in workshops with students and professionals and the results indicated a positive effect on the number of generated proposals. With the use of morphological overview in Integral design method and the C-K theory to focus on specific transformations par example from knowledge to concepts or from concepts to knowledge is it possible to make the conceptual design phase more transparent. The innovative Concept-Knowledge theory by Hatchuel and Weil was used in combination with the Integral Design method. This combination enables illustration of different processes within the conceptual design phase of multi-disciplinary building design. It also makes it possible to see the effect of the so called C-constructs to stimulate the generation of concepts. This paper focuses on the effect of the so called C-constructs. Results from earlier research indicated a clear positive quantitative effect in the use of C-construct. However the different effects of C-projects in defining new functions or aspects were not considered; we only looked at the quantitative effect on the number of generated conceptual proposals. By using the morphological overview as a representative of the outcome of the conceptual design process we also looked in more analytical effects of the C-projectors resulting in more functions or aspects mentioned in the morphological overview after implementation of Cprojects by design teams.
Keywords: Multi-disciplinary design, morphological overview, integral design, C-K theory