Najafi Elahe, P.H. D student will complete his P.H. D thesis on “Enhancing Architects' Thinking Function in Integrated Ideation with Engineers Building Envelope Bionic Design"in 21 April 2018 11:00 am.link
Supervisor:

 Dr. Mohsen Feyzi
Dr. Mohammad Ali Khanmohammadi

Abstract
To incorporate architectural ideas into engineering design of bionic envelopes, architectural and engineering ideation must be integrated. But architects and engineers do not have a common language and there is a problem in their mental interactions that makes effective mental communication between them time-consuming and hard. So that architects have difficulty to engage intellectually with engineers, especially in integrated designs. This will make architects to be less effective in integrated design teams and have no significant influence on design results. In this research, the integrated ideation of architects and mechanical engineers in bionic design of the envelope for the human future residence on Mars has been studied. Knowledge from biological phenomena is categorized into six levels of abstraction, which consists of four analogical levels; function, mechanism, structure, form and two biased similarity levels as concept and direct use. Designers' thinking function in the content and the process of ideation has been explored for information processing in the problem space and mental interaction. The impact of the designer's discipline and abstraction levels of thought (analogical and biased) on designers' thinking function and interaction has been explored. The protocol analysis method is used to study the research data, which includes recording group audio and video sessions and performing conversations, and finally coding and statistical analysis of the data. The results of the research show that architects and engineers have different thinking functions and thinking models in design because of different educational backgrounds and experiences. The mentality and thinking of engineers is more hierarchical than architects and more based on reasoning by cause-and-effect, while the mentality and thinking of architects are less hierarchical and based on the associative relationship of form and meaning. Having a hierarchical thinking improves the designer's thinking and interaction and design thinking. Hierarchical thinking also leads to deeper reasoning and deeper thinking. Hence, architects' thinking is more superficially than engineers, and their information processing is more limited and they have less mental interaction than engineers. To enhance the mental and thinking function of the architects in the integrated design with engineers, a design model has been introduced which has hierarchical causal levels. The proposed model is a complementary model of engineering design ontological model. This model consists of six abstraction levels of form, structure, mechanism, function, and meaning (purpose).
 
 
Keywords:  Design thinking, integrated design, design abstraction model, architectural design, engineering design