Outlining state-of-the-art developments in the area of complexity and design, this book collates them into a unique and authoritative resource for both the design and complex systems communities. The book is based on research which focuses on a variety of different themes and domains, including architecture, engineering, environmental design, art, fashion and management. A ground-breaking publication marking a new era of appreciation of the import of complexity on design, this book is essential reading for those studying complexity or design.

It is believed that behind the conception of generative design systems there are many design theories, methods and models as well as reasoning systems that contribute to offer more than images, data or software. The research assumes that computational models have the potential to aid devising pedagogical approaches for developing students design competences. It adopts a rule-based tool, and uses grammar-based projects, charrettes and analytical tasks to explore and evaluate the development of design capacities in several architectural schools.[GRAPHICS]Students' interpretation of rubber pattern formation

New styles can be created by modifying existing ones. In order to formalize style change using grammars, style has to be formally defined in the design language of a grammar. Previous studies in the use of grammars for style change do not give explicit rationale for transformation. How would designers decide which rules to modify in a grammar to generate necessary changes in style(s) of designs? This paper addresses the aforementioned issues by presenting a framework for strategic style change using goal-driven grammar transformations. The framework employs a style description scheme constructed by describing the aesthetic qualities of grammar elements using adjectival descriptors. We present techniques for the formal definition of style in the designs generated by grammars. The utility of the grammar transformation framework and the style description scheme is tested with an example of mobile phone design. Analyses reveal that constraining rules in grammars is a valid technique for generating designs with a dominance of desired adjectival descriptors, thus aiding in strategic style change.

If we are to capitalise on the potential that a design approach might bring to innovation in business and society, we need to build a better understanding of the evolving skill-sets that designers will need and the contexts within which design might operate. This demands more discourse between those involved in cutting edge practice, the researchers who help to uncover principles, codify knowledge and create theories and the educators who are nurturing future design talent. This book promotes such a discourse by reporting on the work of twenty research teams who explored different facets of future design activity as part of Phase 2 of the UK's research council supported Designing for the 21st Century Research Initiative. Each of these contributions describes the origins of the project, the research team and their project aims, the research methods used and the new knowledge and understanding generated. Editor and Initiative Director, Professor Tom Inns, provides an introductory chapter that suggests ways the reader might navigate these viewpoints. This chapter concludes with an overview of the key lessons that might be learnt from this collection of design research activity.

The concept of style is relevant for both the analysis and synthesis of designs. New styles are often formed by the adaptation of previous ones based on changes in design criteria and context. A formal characterization of style is given by shape grammars, which describe the compositional rules underlying a set of designs. Stylistic change can be modelled by grammar transformations, which allow the transformation of the structure and vocabulary of a grammar that is used to describe a particular style. In order for grammars to be useful beyond a single application, they should have the capability to be transformed according to changing design style needs. Issues of formalizing stylistic change necessitate a lucid and formal definition of style in the design language generated by a grammar. Furthermore, a significant aspect of the definition of style is the representation of aesthetic qualities attributed to the style. We focus on grammars for representing and generating styles of design and review the use of grammar transformations for modelling changes in style and design language. We identify a gap in knowledge in the representation of style in grammars and in driving strategic style change using grammar transformations.

SUMMARY: This paper describes a teaching experience conducted and carried out as part of the coursework of first year students. The workshop is the third of three workshops planned to take place during the course of the first year studio, aimed at introducing new ways of thinking and introducing students to a new pattern of architectural education. The experiment was planned under the theme of “Evaluation” during the final stage. A grammatical approach was chosen to deliver the methodology in the design studio, based on shape grammars.

This paper describes a teaching experience conducted and carried out as part of the coursework of first year students of architecture at Strathclyde University. The workshop is the Third of three workshops planned to take place during the course of the first year studio, aimed at introducing new ways of thinking and introducing students to a new pattern of architectural education. The experiment was planned under the theme of “Evaluation” during the Final stage. A grammatical approach was chosen to deliver the methodology in the design studio, based on shape grammars.

In recent years, 3D virtual worlds have been explored for design teaching, yet it is unclear whether a specific pedagogy is used or adapted for such activities. Here we describe the pedagogical model of Cybergogy of Learning Archetypes and Learning Domains, developed specifically for teaching in 3D immersive virtual worlds, and its application to introductory building classes in the virtual world Second Life for architectural design students and teachers as part of the ARCHI21 project.

This paper describes a teaching experience conducted and carried out as part of the coursework of first year students of architecture in two different countries. The workshop is the second of three workshops planned to take place during the course of the first year studio, aimed at introducing new ways of thinking and introducing students to a new pattern of architectural education. The experiment was planned under the theme of “Production” in the mid-stage that is considered the operational stage of the design process. It also succeeded a recognition stage in which the students’ visual reasoning skills were targeted with more open and less determined design tasks. A grammatical approach was chosen to deliver the methodology in the design studio, based on the shape grammar methodology.

This paper offers insights into innovative practice being undertaken in higher architectural and design education, where both language and content teaching and learning are integrated as interwoven parts with joint curricular roles. Using Expansive Learning Theory as an analytical framework to examine potential tensions and contradictions arising from the educational approach of Content and Language Integrated Learning, reference is made to three very recent pilot studies of the EU funded project, ARCHI21. The experiential learning in these studies adopted a blended approach, where classical face-to-face learning-teaching scenarios were supported by immersive 3D virtual environments together with social networking media and Web 2.0 tools. This paper uses these pilot studies to speculate on aspects of fragility and offers reflection on future project activity.

Currently available computer-aided design tools provide strong support for the later stages of product development processes where the structure and shape of the design have been fixed. Support for earlier stages of product development, when both the structure and shape of the design are still fluid, demands conceptual design tools that support designers' ways of thinking and working, and enhance creativity, for example, by offering design alternatives, difficult or not, possible without the use of such tools. The potential of spatial grammars as a technology to support such design tools has been demonstrated through experimental research prototypes since the 1970s. In this paper, we provide a review of recent spatial grammar implementations, which were presented in the Design Computing and Cognition 2010 workshop on which this paper is based, in the light of requirements for conceptual design tools and identify future research directions in both research and design education.

This paper describes a teaching experience conducted and carried out as part of the architectural coursework of the first year students. The workshop is the first of three planned to take place during the course of the first year studio. It aims at introducing new ways of thinking as well as introducing students to the new pattern of architectural education; It also helps communicating and-if required-unlearning accumulative conceptions that were unconsciously gained by the lack of practice, ignorance of actuality or simply by the accumulation of images and ideas in their minds over the years. A grammatical approach was chosen to develop the described methodology, based on the shape grammars system in general, and on one of its basic skills of seeing/understanding shapes & extracting elements of the visual composition in particular.

This paper describes a teaching experience conducted and carried out as part of the architectural coursework of the first year students.The workshop is the first of three planned to take place during the course of the first year studio. It aims at introducing new ways of thinking as well as introducing students to the new pattern of architectural education; It also helps communicating and-if required-unlearning accumulative conceptions that were unconsciously gained by the lack of practice, ignorance of actuality or simply by the accumulation of images and ideas in their minds over the years.A grammatical approach was chosen to develop the described methodology, based on the shape grammars system in general, and on one of its basic skills of seeing/understanding shapes & extracting elements of the visual composition in particular.

This paper describes a new methodology of deriving innovative hybrid designs using shape grammars of heterogeneous designs. The method is detailed within three phases of shape grammars: analysis, synthesis and evaluation.In the analysis phase, the research suggests that original rules of each design component are grouped in subclass rule sets to facilitate rule choices.Additionally, adding new hybrid rules to original rules expands the options available to the grammar user. In the synthesis phase, the research adopts state labels and markers to drive the design generation. The former is implemented with a user guide grammar to ensure hybridity in the generated design, while the latter aims to ensure feasible designs. Lastly evaluation criteria are added to measure the degree of innovation of the hybrid designs. This paper describes the derivation of hybrid minaret designs from a corpus of heterogeneous traditional minaret designs.

1 Background Today's computer aided design systems are based on underlying technologies developed over 20 years ago. Although they have become a key part of the design process, and are ubiquitous in industrial product development processes, they usually come into play after the shape of the design has been created. In essence, today's CAD systems are used to support design evaluation and analysis, and downstream applications such as manufacturing. Our research challenge was to bring computers into the start of the creative design process, where they can augment design activity by supporting design synthesis: enhancing and highlighting options that might be open to the designer. Our vision was of a computer aided design synthesis system that can work with and manipulate designers' sketches at the earliest stage of the design process. Previous research in the application of shape grammars to design generation indicated that they offered a potential foundation upon which such a system could be built. Since first proposed in the early 1970s, a number of shape grammar-based design systems have been built. All, however, have struggled to find a way to identify automatically key elements of a shape, so- called "sub-shape detection". Sub-shape detection is essential to the automation of the shape grammar technology and, therefore, the realization of usable computer aided design synthesis systems.

This paper is concerned with how design shapes are generated and explored by means of sketching. It presents research into the way designers transform shapes front one state to another using sketch representations. An experimental investigation of the sketching processes of designers is presented. Connections between sketches are defined in terms of shape transformations and described according to shape rules. These rules provide a formal description of the shape exploration process and develop understanding of the mechanics of sketching in design. The paper concludes by discussing the important phenomenon of 'subshape' and suggests that a computational mechanism for detecting sub-shapes in design sketches might augment explorative sketching by providing important opportunities for manipulating and generating shape in design. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In this paper we discuss observations and lessons learned in conducting architectural design projects in virtual worlds. By integrating a community of users in virtual worlds into a collaborative architectural design process, organisations can tap the community's creativity and intelligence through immersive technology. The paper provides an overview of the latest advances of information and communication technologies in immersive virtual environments and discusses some of the observations and lessons learned which should be taken into account in developing collaboration models for such activities. Here we propose four modes of collaboration, based on the choices for degree of openness and governance structure, which are illustrated by four case studies.

Shape grammars have been used to explore design spaces through design generation according to sets of shape rules with a recursive process. Although design space exploration is a persistent issue in computational design research, there have been few studies regarding the provision of more preferable and refined outcomes to designers. This paper presents an approach for the categorisation of design outcomes from shape grammar systems to support individual preferences via two customised viewpoints: (i) absolute preference values of shape rules and (ii) relative preference values of shape rules with shape rule classification levels with illustrative examples.