This study aims to understand how designers create dialogues with their collaborators in their creative design process. In the past growing society, the role of design was to increase the production speed and efficiency. In this background, researches on design methods has greatly developed since 1960's. However, design problems become more and more complicated in this contemporary society and new design methods are required beyond systematic design methods based on technical rationality. We are trying to explore the new design method under the framework of “designing through dialogue”, in which designers create a dialogue with various situations and develop their design flexibility.
In this paper, we aim to clarify how designers build a relationship with their collaborators and control their design process for activating a dialogue generating new ideas for architectural designing. In addition, we focus on a role of an individual design thinking in their creative design strategies for dialogical design.
Firstly, we conducted a design experiment, in which 16 architectural students participated. After that we analyzed the verbal protocols in their design process and extract key ideas for their design. Secondly, we constructed networks of the ideas they generated based on relations among design ideas and analyzed the networks using network analysis methods. In addition, we tried to grasp the relation between active thinking process and reference relationship using two indexes, the times of self- and other-reference as well as eigenvector centrality in the networks. As a result, we suggested the importance of individual thinking in designing through dialogue. Finally, we extracted the concrete verbal protocols in each teams' design process and considered design strategies for activating the individual design thinking and developing their dialogue process. Specific details are as follows.
1) Conscious development of self-thinking
Through the analysis, we pointed out the importance of reading the characteristics and situations of the dialogue partner's thinking for developing self-thinking process generating new design ideas.
2) Development of design thinking based on the change of situation of the dialogue partner
Also we found the strategy for making the partner generate new ideas by encouraging partner's thinking process actively. For example, they asked questions to the idea that the dialogue partner generated and had the partner share the situation of own thinking process.
3) Design thinking process developed complementarily
Of course, self-thinking process is not always necessary to generate new design ideas. Therefore, we analyzed the design process of two teams expanding the idea complementarily. In the design processes, they always tried to build their consensus about the contents and policy of their design steadily by setting opportunities to share what they are thinking about.
