Judgement by design: Towards a model for studying and improving the competition process in architecture and urban design

Abstract

In the fields of architectural and urban design, judging is a disciplinary tradition. There is hardly any design that is not complemented by a judging process be it in schools, in professional offices, and in this peculiar democratic phenomenon called: architectural competition. Although commonly spread in the everyday practice, judgement has been little theorised. If asked to give a theoretical model of judgement one might quickly fall short of diagrams. Some might argue that the same could be said of “design thinking” but that would be erroneous considering the last 50 years of research and attempts at theoretical modelling. This paper seeks to contribute to the theoretical modelling of architectural judgement by exploring the hypothesis of a fundamental analogy between designing and judging. We call this model: judgement by design.