Understanding the Use of IoT Systems as Architecture Design Stimuli

Abstract

We are entering a new area of information science that we calling the Internet of Things (IoT). It connects machine with machine, machine with infrastructure and machine with environment, the Internet of everything. More generally, we see IoT as massive amounts of connected concepts that encompass every aspect of our lives. Meanwhile, architects often explore novel design ideas of their knowledge and skills for innovation, even though such ideas rely on their own experience, expertise or intuition, so that it brings the negative effects on creative architecture design. Numerous studies have investigated that concept-synthesizing processes is a key to creative design. However, there is little work specifically on understanding the use of IoT systems as architecture design stimuli. In this paper, we present a model of using IoT systems as design stimuli for architecture concept generation, in this model we abstract IoT systems into ‘input part’, ‘process part’ and ‘output part’. Through a controlled experiment and extended protocol analysis, this research showed that IoT systems stimulate creative architecture design both in design process and design result, in addition, participants often choose the ‘input part’ as design stimuli while ‘input part’ and ‘output part’ both have the promoter action to creativity. Moreover, ‘process part’ prefers to enhance the extension of idea space in concept generation process.