Designdialoger i tidiga skeden. Arbetssätt och verktyg för kundengagerad arbetsplatsutformning

Doctoral thesis, 2004

Today, a new focus on the customer has been established in the building sector. The early phases of building projects has accordingly received greater attention in order to promote the implementation of quality, customer focus and longterm cost-effective real estate business. This thesis describes the development of a design way of working in the early phases of building projects - design dialogues. The purpose of the design dialogues is to support the formulation of goals and identification of costumer needs as well as to generate ideas as input to the architectural design process. When the design dialogues are carried out in the early phases of workplace projects, I call it customer engaged workplace design. The design way of approaching the specification phase of the design process implies the providing of arenas for design activities. It is a workshop-driven model, which includes the active collaboration between client, customers, users and the architect. The workshops depend on the participants’ use of a variety of design materials and tools, such as video, design games and scenarios. The collaborative production of design artifacts based on these design materials, plays a vital role in supporting dialogue and innovative thinking. During the thesis work, a computer based prototype has been developed in order to support the involvement of non-professional designers in conceptual architectural design. The prototype, called ForeSite Designer, is very easy to use and enables the users to sketch architectural layouts in 2D on the computer screen, which can be instantly exported to a real-time 3D world. The development work has been carried out as a series of action research projects in collaboration with different companies and organisations. With the goal that the developed methods and tools will be possible to implement in practice, a proposal for how to set up a costumer engaged workplace design project is outlined as a conclusion.