Towards a new representational ecosystem for the design studio

Abstract

The collection of visual and physical simulation tools available to a design team constitutes what can be termed the Representational Ecosystem of the design studio. Current digital paradigm does not effectively support design discussions because it is limited to the pictorial-frame and scaled representations. We analyzed for the first time the link between the Interconnected Hybrid Ideation Space (HIS) and the representational ecosystem of a design studio as a case study. The Hybrid Representational Ecosystem is proposed to better achieve a comprehensive and closer view of the design solution because it is fully hybrid (analog/digital), it supports multiple kinds of representations, scales, and co-design. The epistemology and principles of the new paradigm are described. © 2014, The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.