Design Process In Architecture

How can architects best increase their engagement with society to provide better architecture?

In the design process, the first thing that architects should do is knowing the place. In this approach, information about the climate, orientation and type of soil are not enough, the problems, activities and interaction that have the people or must have in that place have the same relevance of importance to take in consideration. Because sometimes, if architects don’t take care of this aspects, have very early preconceptions in the proposal of design solutions.

This situation encourages architects to constantly try new methods to involve users in the design. In class we saw one of this methods in which each one of us described their own perspective about the campus. In the first activity in teams of 8 persons we do a map of the campus, but it wasn’t a common map, without any scale, this map was composed by drawings that exemplified what is more significal for us and is part of our daily life, in the second activity, on a real map we put small dots in the places that we consider important or unuseful, and finally, in the third activity we have to write the places or things that we like, we don’t like and are interesting. Public areas, the use of bicycles inside the campus and the infrastructure that the gym have and the architecture building are the favorite ones between the students, parking and even the fee-paying of the school were the things that they don’t like.

The resultant of these methods might attain a more appropriate and effective design. Because people, in this case, students are seen as capable of designing and redesigning the built space they occupy.

The benefits are for both parts, it might be challenging for the architect because the aspects to consider are a lot, but at the same time when the users get involved in the project, have a chance to influence the conceptual design phase and have a better result in the phase of construction and living.

...