ST-16-C045 -- Competences beyond Engineering: A Mental Model of Conceptual Building Design ✓ Most Recent

The need for more sustainable solutions makes design an increasingly complex task. New supportive tools and methods are thereby required to stimulate cooperation within multi-disciplinary design teams to reach synergy between them to generate new sustainable proposals. Multi-disciplinary design teams need especially in the conceptual design phase more support. Therefore a design method was developed which focuses on the creation of proposals in the conceptual phase of design based on sharing of the knowledge and experience of the design team members by using a morphological overview based on the individual morphological chart of design team members. This enables the design team to exchange information with other team members. In this study a theoretical approach for analysing the development of shared mental models in the architectural and engineering disciplines. The mental model can be used to guide the behaviour of different designers with the design team. The sharing of knowledge and experience is an important competence beyond the domain specific engineering, which is of crucial importance to effectively make contributions towards the design. After testing through workshops and trainings in the industry the method was used by students in the course of a two day workshop. The workshops were used to examine the effects of different interventions to stimulate creativity of a design team. In this case, introducing a professional to the student teams at the last session of the workshop.