Abstract
A style could be seen as a cultural sign, a social phenomenon, a product symbol, or a way of doing things coming from some individual or group effort. Apart from examining style from outcomes of intentional purposes, this chapter focuses on how an individual style is shaped in design processes approached from the perspective of design cognition. Particularly, attention is on the schematic design stage, which is considered the most critical stage for a design project to be formulated before its final form is determined and constructed. The purpose is to explore how a style is developed in the design process. Fundamental concepts are based on the supposition that an individual style is identified by a set of common features created by a series of mental processes on managing design information. If products share many common features, then there should be many common processes of using similar information utilized in the process, and the style of the products will be strongly expressed and recognized. Therefore, the numbers of common features in products and similar operational factors in processes determine the degree of style, and a style can be defined and measured by the function of common features and factors.
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Notes
- 1.
Representation has been explained in Chap. 2. In short, it means a set of conventions about how to describe a class of things. Knowledge representation in design signifies a set of conventions available for rationally describing design knowledge. The set of conventions can be seen and elaborated as a hierarchical network of symbols stored in the designers’ memory, and each symbol in the network has attributes defining architectural objects or tectonics.
- 2.
Designers have a large set of design knowledge accumulated from experience. Generally speaking, design knowledge as explained in Chap. 2 consists of two major parts, declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. Schemata are kinds of “knowledge representation” computer codes construed to show knowledge in design constraint format with design rules embedded. They usually are expressed in the form of production systems, which is an ordered set of processes called productions. Each production contains a paired condition and action. The condition part contains declarative knowledge, and the action part has a set of rules representing the procedural knowledge. Whenever a condition is satisfied, an action is executed (see Newell and Simon 1972, pp. 32–33.) In architectural design, the application of a recalled schema from memory at a particular design stage will make its associated rules available and a solution can be generated.
- 3.
Usually, a design problem contains an initial situation for the designer and is referred to as the initial state. A goal state is the stage at which the design problem has been resolved. The process of problem solving from initial state to goal state can be modeled as a series of transformations generating a sequence of problem states. A problem state is a particular stage in which a designer knows a set of things, and is referred to as a knowledge state. The various states that the designer can achieve are called problem spaces. The various ways of changing one state into another are symbolically called paths. A solution path is the path leading to the final solution (see Chan 2008).
- 4.
A design brief usually lists the design requirements and describes the nature of a design task, which can be categorized as the owner’s background (social, cultural, and economical), building type, design issues (design constraints), site issues (climatic, contextual, or geographical conditions), and space requirements (the quantitative and qualitative requirements). The term “owner” should be referred to as users in a larger context or in a complicated building design.
- 5.
It is essential to get enough data about the individual designer, the information he has, and how he is processing it. The method is to use the high output rate of verbal behavior as data which are termed verbal protocols. The process is to instruct the designer to report verbally everything he thinks about as he works on the design problem.
- 6.
The term “semantic solution” refers to a solution that is very abstract and is expressed mostly in verbal terms. The subject in this experiment always developed the first overall idea (solution) of the building in the form of a design scenario that managed his developed design issues. The solution at this stage was very flexible, schematic, and open-ended.
- 7.
The notion of the light schemata differs from the notion of pattern language developed by Christopher Alexander in 1977. Pattern language is a method of generating building designs. It is an approach which constructs concepts for a building by combining patterns for smaller parts of the building. “The elements of this language are entities called patterns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice” (Alexander et al. 1977, p. x). A pattern can be selected from past experience or from precedents that seem most appropriate for the new project. Then a pattern is developed by combining smaller patterns to represent a summary of the building element and to show the overall idea of the building. This method of combining patterns to solve a design problem differs from applying design constraints and their associated rules for solution generations.
- 8.
Case-based reasoning relates to the comparison of a new situation to existing situations, selecting appropriate architectural solutions from memory and adapting those solutions.
- 9.
The architect verbally described the location, the date, and the form of the images of his early design works. In some instances, he also sketched the images.
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Chan, CS. (2015). Creation of Style in the Design Process. In: Style and Creativity in Design. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14017-9_6
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