فرهاد شریعت راد

Problem statement:

Although the field of the research process is new, research in this area has advanced rapidly. This reflects the diversity of intellectual and theoretical methods governing the research process. The majority of studies have described design experiences using an analytical approach and point of view. The approach of thinking about design has often been overlooked in this research. The main concern of processes will be lost due to this detached viewpoint, yet the design process itself is a style of thinking. Regardless of the awareness gained from the research phase, the design process will invariably apply logical thinking processes to achieve its purpose. As a result, the goal of this study is to figure out the link between deduction and metaphor as a style of reasoning. Also, what influence can metaphor have as an argumentative approach in creating an architectural work?

Research objective:

This study attempts to understand the link between deduction and metaphor as a core thinking tool in design methodologies and apply it logically.

Research method:

Deductive and inferential reasoning was employed in two stages, the bibliographic method was used for data collection, and the logical reasoning method was used for data analysis.

This research aims to understand better the role and function of logical reasoning in the architectural design process and the impact of metaphor as an arguing tool. According to the conclusions of this study, deduction and metaphor are among the complete logical procedures that play a crucial role in the production of architectural works in a four-part mechanism. By keeping the features of deduction, metaphor is a type of deduction that leads to the uniqueness and twofold meaning in architecture.

Indeed, every architectural design idea comes from somewhere or is inspired from some points. Thus, there is a source for ideation. Architectural designers are constantly faced with ambiguous and complex situations. Therefore, their minds usually fly to a given point after encountering design problems, and the preparations and requirements of the ideation appear as a function in the design process. Ideation can be involved in all stages in a thinking cycle, including innovation, development, and the realization of an idea. Although there are some essential notions in the architectural design process that are not easily distinguished separately, each of them has its exclusive meaning. Some of these seemingly similar definitions including, an idea, a concept, a primary generator, or an initial generator; and, architectural contributors such as designers, professors, instructors, and the students who are under the education of architecture in an academic institution or university use them a lot. This mentioned issue illuminates the importance of the vital role of ideation in the architectural design process. Besides, providing a worldwide cognition of ideation and its crucial role in the architectural design process can lead researchers to accomplish a variety of comprehensive investigations. After introducing the ideation as an essential activity in the design process, some questions should be answered. For Example, what are the sources of architectural design ideation, and what are their contributions to the process of ideas’ forming? Responding to these mentioned questions, an article entitled “the sources of architectural ideation, focusing on the professional architects’ ideation processes” has already been pursued. The present research, has made an effort to answer the above questions by focusing on the architecture students' ideation process in different academic degrees and years. In this way, a more realistic view of the ideation sources comes in to picture, and it becomes possible to compare the expert and novice designers' performance. For the field studies of this present essay, the ideation of architectural design processes of 121 architecture students of Shahid Beheshti University was examined as the case studies. As the subjects of this statistical analysis, these selected students consisted of the first-year undergraduates to the four-year undergraduates studying in their bachelor’s at that time, and the first-year and the second-year students of master’s degree. After completing the data gatherings, categorizing, and analyzing, the primary sources of ideation among the architectural students were appraised based on the influential factors in idea production. These are the factors assigned to the design problem, and the factors assigned to designers. In other words, it turned out that their ideation sources were divided into two categories of “design problem-oriented factors” and “designer-oriented factors”. Furthermore, their shares were defined after the descriptive and extrapolative statistical analysis of gained data. It showed that the design problems factors have a higher contribution to the idea formation of the students. Although this finding corresponds with the research of the professional architects, among the students, the ratio of the "design problem-oriented factors" to the "designer-oriented-factors" is impressively higher than the expert designers.

 Though it has not been a long time since design research emerged as a branch of science, the consistent creation of architectural works proves the existence of design methods. Such methods have developed even though knowledge about them is limited. Some methodologists have identified methods characterized by timelessness. These methods are important because they have constantly revealed themselves in the history of design. This research aimed to analyze the Grand Mosque of Fahraj to investigate the role and effect of the narrative method on the way this mosque has been designed using the intertextual analysis method. The research problem concerns the effect of the narrative method on building the Grand Mosque of Fahraj and addresses the quality of narration of the Al-Nabi Mosque’s designer as a source of analogy for its design.

This study sought to investigate the effects of the narrative method on creating and building the Grand Mosque of Fahraj.

The research employs a qualitative method. After reviewing the written sources, as data collection method, the theory of intertextuality was used to analyze the work as a text, as the architectural design method was also examined.

The Grand Mosque of Fahraj seems to be designed through a narrative design process. This narration is based on Al-Nabi mosque which is regarded as a source of analogy for design in the Grand Mosque of Fahraj.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, most educational interactions were redirected towards virtual environments. Architectural education was no exception, and continued in virtual and online environments. But architecture education has architectural design studios at its core, which makes it different from other disciplines. Architectural design studios need a cooperative, multi-sensory, and experimental environment concentrated on multi-faceted problems, which renders virtual environments questionable. These environments are no matching substitutes for physical environments for their shortcomings in providing essential features mentioned above. In response, an investigation was made as to how to recreate architectural education in the current situation, improving educational processes. To do so Grounded Theory method was used in the context of architectural design studios in Shahid Beheshti University held in 2020, all held in a virtual environment because of the pandemic. Structured observation, semi-structured interviews, and group discussions were used to collect data. Open, axial, and selective coding were used to analyse the data. In the end, member checking was used to validate final results and conclusions. Findings show that 11 factors in two broad groups can influence the performance of an architectural design studio, namely, Context and Possibilities, and Educational Processes. Context and Possibilities include attitudes towards the virtual studio, studio-holding methods, software, hardware, and information resources. Educational Processes include educational structure, programme content of the studio, time management, educational methods, presentation methods, and the interaction between students and the tutor. To conclude, recommendations were made to manage these factors based on the experience of the participating tutors.

The mismatches between the sensitivities, interests, attitudes, and values ​​of an architecture instructor and the students regarding valuable and noteworthy elements of a design situation have always been encountered in architectural education. Specifically, as long as noteworthy elements from an instructor’s point of view are not internalized in students’ value system, there will be no belief in their value or usefulness in the students’ design process and so, no guarantee of applying them in practice. The main question of the paper is, "How does internalization of a value and its placement in the student value system happen in the architectural design studio?" Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to formulate a model/theoretical framework for 'internalizing values'. In this regard, an educational "value internalization model" is first proposed by interpreting and analyzing library resources, with a special focus on the five-stage model of affective development known as the taxonomy of affective domain. It has five levels and reflects the learner's affective encounter with the value of things. The higher these levels go, the greater the value in the internal structure controlling one's behavior. The five levels of the proposed model are: passive motivation, active motivation, planning the value discovery scenario, planning the practice of facing multiple values, and finally planning practice in different situations. Then, to evaluate the practical performance of the proposed model, a quasi-experimental test is designed, implemented, and reported. The results show that applying the suggested model in the architectural design studio can increase the students’ affective development over what the tutor is looking for. Thus, if the mentioned valuable item is in the design situation, the students consider it important and use it in their design processes.

Asistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, Shahid Beheshti University Music is an abstract art which tries to make connections with the world of meanings, and architecture is an applied one, which can respond to mental requirements and convey transcendental thoughts on top of responding to physical needs. They share formal denotational aspects, whether qualitative or quantitative, and many have attempted to associate the two by drawing parallels between architectural and musical works, both structurally and conceptually, and to a lesser extent, by finding common purposes between them. Trying to introduce commonalities between architecture and music,with reference to the features of Iranian architecture and music, the present paper tries to focus on their qualitative aspects. Besides theoretical debates regarding commonalities and differences between architecture and music, it seems that many audiences have had personal experiences of finding modal similarities Iranian architecture and music.
The question is, therefore, that of formal and denotational commonalities between the two artforms, namely, which Iranian architecture factors make it coherent with Iranian music in the audience’s mind? To answer, it is necessary to start with recognising the two artforms’ characteristics, particularly in their Iranian versions. This is continued with a closer scrutiny in order to extract common qualities using a hermeneutic approach. In conclusion some factors are introduced, which can be used to understand commonalities between the two, recognising that the appreciation of these commonalities might differ from one person to the other.

Recent design research has shed light on designers thinking and knowledge acquisition mechanisms, design expertise, as well as design education methodologies. Problem Framing is an effective strategy designers employ to manage the complexities of open-ended unstructured design problems. Drawing on the findings of studies conducted for the PhD dissertation of one of the authors, this paper explains definitions and the background of problem framing and its role in the critical junction of problem definition. It explains that by framing a design problem, the designer selects important aspects of the design problem; redefines relations between theses aspects; postulates tentative responses to this new problem; reflects on these responses; assesses the feedbacks of such postulations; and reformulates the problem if necessary. Problem framing thus becomes the primary mental representation of the problem for the designer, which influences the subsequent design process.

The current Bachelor of Architecture curriculum has been taught for the past eight years. In this curriculum, the last course is called Final Design in which the students design a project in its entirety drawing on all their studies and demonstrating their capacity as professional architects. This paper reports the results of a survey undertaken amongst graduates of architecture of Yazd University on the impact of this course on their professional activity. The results indicate that this course plays its supposed role in developing students’ professional capacity, yet it would be more effective if during its presentation: the design process is supervised; the design problem is more carefully chosen in terms of size and scope; and efficient use is made of other professionals during project design and its assessment.

Preliminary design ideas, mostly not manifest, are generated in the designers’ minds at the very early stages of their encounter with the design problems. This paper reports a study of the sources from which these ideas are originated, and the corresponding role each source plays in the process of designing. The study was undertaken through the analysis of semi-structured interviews with eight Iranian professional architects about the ideation process of at least one of their design projects. To complement the data gathered through interviews, each interview was followed by a discussion session within a group of graduate architecture students, reflecting on the narratives as well as the documents presented by the participating architects. The interviews as well as the discussion sessions were administered within the framework of a graduate course unit entitled ‘Ideation and the Design Process’, taking a time span of two academic semesters. Graduate students, set in groups of two to five members, contributed to conducting the interviews and further preparing the corresponding written documents. Each group was briefed to interview one of the participating architects, assuring to cover seven key questions of a pre-designed interview pro forma; the questions aiming to uncover the participants’ trains of thought leading to the generation of the central design ideas, and further design developments. In a number of cases, a complementary interview was conducted by the authors to corroborate the written documents prepared by students. A content analysis of the architects’ statements, transcribed from either the interviews or the discussion sessions, was used to identify the role of different sources of design ideas in each design situation. An axial coding of the contributing factors to design ideation, as declared by the architects, verified the central role of the design situation in due course. Three main contributing factors to any design situation were further categorized into ‘the factors brought in by the designer’ and ‘the factors brought in by the design problem’, the latter covering both ‘the site attributes’, and ‘the design brief’ of any design situation. Frequently pronounced by the participating architects, the above mentioned factors can be reckoned as the main sources of design ideation. The findings of the study suggest that the ‘design problems’ were, in sixty percent of the cases, the main source for the design ideation. Design ideas, though, seem to be generated mostly through contemplating the problem situation, i.e. the content and the context of the design task. It was also indicated by the findings that a rating of forty percent of design ideas was evidently brought to the situation by the designers, prior to contemplating the problem variables. In such cases, the designers proved to have drawn on a personal set of cognitive and affective constructs, implying their knowledge and attitude, to come up with the central design ideas. Having acknowledged the changing degree to which any source contributes to idea generation, the paper concludes with a three-fold model which might be used to demonstrate the corresponding roles the sources play in any design situation.