Sharing and Developing Design Ideas

The broad theme of this issue is the potential of digital tools and communication technologies to enable the sharing of design and design ideas between individuals and groups. In all of the cases the goal is to improve the quality of design understanding and design development by using digital technologies as an enabler. Hudson’s paper shows how a parametric model can be regarded as a representation of a solution space. Contrary to the typical view of parametric modeling the paper aims to demonstrate that a parametric model can develop from an incomplete problem description. Hudson uses a particular real case study of Lansdowne Road Stadium, Dublin to illustrate how this can be. One of the potentials of contemporary techniques and technologies is to allow citizens in communities to gain a better understanding of design proposals.Tomohiro Fukuda,Atsuko Kaga, Hideaki Izumi and Takanori Terashima have developed a very interesting and useful system for such an application.Their system uses VR (Virtual Reality) and CGM (Consumer Generated Media) as design or communication media in the design process. Again, an actual design case study is used to illustrate how the research can be applied in practice. The next three papers consider aspects of application in an educational context. Buthayna Eilouti’s research incorporates concepts and applications of ergonomics and kinetics as two ingredients and concept generators with problem-based learning techniques for architectural design.The work shows how a problem-based designing approach seems to foster critical thinking amongst participants.The conclusion is that there is a consequent improvement in the collaborative design process when such techniques are used. At the eCAADe Conference in Antwerp, 2008 the annual award of the Ivan Petrovic prize was made to the best presentation of a paper.The winner was Luisa Dalla Vecchia, and she along with Adriane da Silva and Alice Pereira have described an experiment in which a virtual learning environment was used in the context of an architectural design course.The intention is to improve the communication and interaction process between the designer and the educator and the authors show how this may be achieved. Katsuhiko Muramoto, Michael Jemtrud, Sonali Kumar, Bimal Balakrishnan and Danielle Wiley report on a study that investigated the issues and effectiveness of the communication of design ideas between students at different Universities and using different technological capabilities.The