How designs evolve

TL;DR: The invariant relationships that couple shapes and structures as they change over the course of design are discussed and the findings yield convergent patterns of behaviour that characterise the coevolution of designs and design thinking, albeit differences in design preferences.

Abstract: The last few decades have witnessed the rise of different theoretical design paradigms in architecture. Some of the most significant paradigms of knowledge in this domain were associated with the notion of Design Methodology. With a common vision, studies that looked into the configurations of shapes (shape grammar) and structures (space syntax) in architecture agree on the possibility of externalising a universal language to interpret architectural artefacts. Studies in this field were mostly focused on the spatial and social architectural artefact. No studies were known to approach how spatial relationships and shape proportions evolve during the course of design. Within the framework of protocol analysis, research was often focused on decoding design cognitive activity. The development of sketches and thoughts during the course of design could be further illuminated through syntactic and grammatical descriptions as metrics to evaluate the quantitative properties of architectural design sketches. Hence, this paper presents an attempt to bring all these lines together to outline how shapes and spatial structures coevolve with the pronounced mental activity. The premise is that there is some underlying logic that couples these different processes. This logic might be traced in how sketches develop and in models that represent verbalised design actions. For this purpose, verbal comments along with their associated hand-drawn sketches were externalised and modelled. Focus was centred on whether the partitioning of spaces in architectural drawings would coincide with regular patterns of cognitive activity. The addition of partitions marks changes to the shapes and structures of designs, but is also likely to correspond to major changes in the cognitive flow marked by making decisions. The paper discusses the invariant relationships that couple shapes and structures as they change over the course of design and tracks their associated cognitive behaviour on a linkograph. The findings yield convergent patterns of behaviour that characterise the coevolution of designs and design thinking, albeit differences in design preferences.