Participatory Architectural Modeling: Common Images and Destributed Design Developments

Abstract

Drawing on cases of teamwork in architectural modeling, this paper reports a study in rich and informative approaches to participatory design. Two features of participation and coordination among designers are observed: (1) for technical necessities, members of a design team work in individual design worlds calling upon heterogeneous conceptual structures and instruments; and (2) for critical judgements, the emergence of final unity in design products as a whole is of common concern shared by all participants, which is dynamically related to the developments of design solutions in individual domains. By abstracting generic patterns of cooperative modeling from the cases discussed, several concepts of communication in participatory design are explored. It is found that a view of situating modeling acts in coupled modeling spaces can lead to a useful exposition of participatory design in terms of the interrelations between common images and distributed design developments. As guiding pointers to further research, the current study identifies two distinct generic patterns of communication in participatory design.