Abstract
Sustainable transitions are challenging management and leadership in architectural practice. As means to overcome fragmentation and drive for sustainability, co-creation has become an emerging trend in construction management research and architectural practice. The early ‘fuzzy’ phase of projects has been identified as of great importance to integrate multidisciplinary perspectives in the design. With action research in architectural practice, three perspectives of co-creation processes were explored to achieve an integrated sustainable design. The experiences are reflected upon, in-action and in retrospect, and through the FfC framework (Framework for Co-designing), the paper contributes with new insight on success/advantage of co-creation processes for sustainable design. Such advantages include the integration of multidisciplinary competences, the creation of stakeholder value and engagement in early phase construction. Further, action research, and especially Gestalt practice and theory, brought a new relational approach to co-creation processes in early design. The architect, in the new role as ‘knowledge-process designer’, shifts focus towards designing interaction instead of artefacts, and thus contributes to SDG 17-Partnerships. The contribution to practice was twofold; 1) a new digital participatory design tool; 2) an innovative sustainable design solution for urban resilience supporting SDGs 11-Sustianable cities, 3-Health, and 14-Climate.
Highlights
The demand for sustainability has brought new challenges to construction projects
The last decade has shown an increase in collaborative research in early phase construction; Action research or Living Lab researchenvironments with transdisciplinary knowledge processes involving professionals from practice and academia in ‘practice-as-research’ [2]
Co-design; the collective creativity as it is applied in the whole design process, and Participatory design; processes that involve non-professionals, are not new
Summary
The demand for sustainability has brought new challenges to construction projects. E.g. the SDG framework (17 goals and 168 sub-targets) and dealing with so called ‘wicked problems’, increased complexity and fragmentation of competences, especially in the early ‘fuzzy’ front-end of projects. The Framework for Co-designing (FfC) Healthcare design in Sweden has a mature research practice on co-design in multi-disciplinary teams Characteristic for these are; dialogue, iterations and reflective processes, as well as strategically designed workshops that involve end-users in a facilitated design-process [10]. An architect-researcher participated in multi-disciplinary teams, with the aim to develop project requirements and sustainable design for a design concept called ‘eco-canopy’ (Figure 1). This was a 3-year transdisciplinary research project focusing design processes and ‘transforming sustainable design’ financed through the Nordic Built Foundation It involved a large group of practicing architects from five companies, and academics (and master students) from four different architecture and engineering faculties in the Nordic countries. Other identified participants were academics, future end-users and a multi-disciplinary design team consisting of: energy engineers, architects, project managers, action researchers, ecologists, environmental specialists, systems-engineers and a parametric design team. The final design-output was attractive and the knowledge output reliable enough to attract other clients to use the resulting design concept in other building projects
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