Mixing Specific and More Universal Design Media to Deal with Multidisciplinarity

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate which strategies designers use to be able to deal with multidisciplinarity in architecture, and by which media designers communicate in this changed conditions. From a literature review, we learn that designers have to use an unpredictable, often long and iterative process in which the cycle of concept, testing, evaluation and conclusion is repeated until a satisfactory solution has been formulated. This turns the design process in an almost endless sequence of models, drawings, texts, images, samples, mock-ups, renderings and other media. And at the same time, designers have to be able to check if all these different investigations match with each other. On the one hand, designers seem to use all kinds of different and distinct media and many different forms of representation to investigate the wide variety of constraints. And on the other, they synthesise all these investigations with diagrams and schemes that bring together all the separate design investigations, and make it possible to match the results from the distinct disciplines. In architecture today, designers seem to combine specific representations, or jargon, together with more universal standard media, at the same time integrating the peculiar and the general.