Abstract

While design researchers use diverse approaches to study designing, non-designers face specific impediments in adopting these research approaches in their quest to gain design knowledge. Recognizing such challenges, this paper outlines how one education academic engineered a first-person methodology to investigate the nature of designing. Through undertaking a learner-researcher study in an undergraduate architectural design basics subject, learning about design through learning to design, she tracked her developing design ideas and crystallized a view of architectural designing as a three-phase heuristic for value selection: imagining possibilities, interpreting ideas to form architectural principles and distilling quality. Her subsequent small-scale test of this value-selection design heuristic in recent cases of architectural design provided preliminary affirmation of its viability. This paper concludes by speculating on various research directions arising from this learner-researcher methodology and a view of designing as value selection and, in particular, provoking consideration of how similar developmental data might be collected and analysed for explanatory insights in diverse design and educational contexts.

Keywords

Architectural design knowledge, first-person research methodology, learner-researcher, value selection, design heuristic

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Jul 9th, 9:00 AM

Developing (architectural) design knowledge: A learner-researcher study

While design researchers use diverse approaches to study designing, non-designers face specific impediments in adopting these research approaches in their quest to gain design knowledge. Recognizing such challenges, this paper outlines how one education academic engineered a first-person methodology to investigate the nature of designing. Through undertaking a learner-researcher study in an undergraduate architectural design basics subject, learning about design through learning to design, she tracked her developing design ideas and crystallized a view of architectural designing as a three-phase heuristic for value selection: imagining possibilities, interpreting ideas to form architectural principles and distilling quality. Her subsequent small-scale test of this value-selection design heuristic in recent cases of architectural design provided preliminary affirmation of its viability. This paper concludes by speculating on various research directions arising from this learner-researcher methodology and a view of designing as value selection and, in particular, provoking consideration of how similar developmental data might be collected and analysed for explanatory insights in diverse design and educational contexts.

 

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