Integrating new and innovative design methodologies at the design stage of housing: ‘How to go’ from conventional to green

Abstract

Paper presented at the XXXIII IAHS World Congress on Housing, 27-30 September 2005,"Transforming Housing Environments through Design", University of Pretoria.

Housing design, both architectural and engineering, is a complex and interrelated set of activities. Much has been written about how the design process works both in theory and in practice. Conventionally, there is a well-developed concept, which conceives the process as a basically linear series of steps contained within a total context or framework. The central design core consists of the key stages of investigation, generating ideas, synthesis, construction, and then evaluation. The synthesis stage is important; this is where all the technical facets of the design are brought together and formed into a ‘final product design specification’. The design core is enclosed within a boundary, containing all the other factors and constraints that need to be considered. This is a disciplined and structured approach to the design process. It sees everything as a series of logical steps situated between a beginning and an end. The proposed design model sees the design process as being also circular, or cyclic, rather than strictly sequential. The process goes round and round, continually refining existing ideas and generating new ones. This activity is innovation based. However, every new construction project is unique. The main elements of the ‘’creativity-evaluation’’ process, is the judgment of the lateral thinking, and the choice of channels for transferring knowledge to team individuals. This paper describes, and evaluates, the approaches taken to achieve the change. It provides information in ‘how to go’ approach a design procedure in order to most efficiently transfer most sufficiently new knowledge to the team. The model has been tested for an environmental friendly housing project, but it could be easily adopted for other new types of construction processes.