SYSTEMATICS OF COMPOSITIONS IN HISTORICAL GARDENS AS A DESIGN SUPPORT IN CONTEMPORARY DESIGN CONCEPTS

People always valued nature around them so the gardens accompanied their houses and residences from the ancient times. Some features of garden compositions were recurring in historical periods differing only in some aspects. In contemporary gardens they are repeated again. To assess the coincidences, a short graphic analysis of the basic features of historical gardens was developed. A tool that has allowed to identify differences and similarities between old and contemporary is the tabulation of composition schemes of well-known historic gardens and comparing the results with the features of the recent developments. This allowed us to investigate whether the same elements of composition, despite 21st century changes, apply today. Key words: residential garden, historical establishments, garden layout, composition, contemporary gardens, repeated solutions.

Design Support Needs to Realize More Effective and Resource-Efficient Offerings: A Comparison Among Large Companies and Small and Medium Enterprises

In an economic paradigm where companies think that more is better and resources are considered infinite, waste, pollution, and environmental degradation are often the result. This can, in turn, be addressed by companies focusing on offerings that are both effective and resource efficient. However, this type of offerings can be more uncertain and complex due to multiple factors such as multiple actors and conflicting objectives taking place at once. Dedicated design support for the relatively new offerings will be helpful for designers in industry. Large and small companies could benefit from the dedicated design support to successfully realize these types of offerings. However, the type of support they might need is not clear. Differences and similarities among large and small companies could guide researchers in providing more reliable support. Therefore, the aim of this research is to present differences and similarities of design support needs among large companies and small and medium enterprises. This is carried out through semi-structured interviews and follow-up meetings. The results show that differences include a formal product realization process for large companies and an informal or no process for smaller ones. Similarities point at design support for better communication and management of their offerings with regard to lead time as well as lifecycle and strategic thinking for decision making. The conclusions highlight the importance for researchers to provide design support that purposefully addresses specific needs.

The ECC Methodology for Architecture Design Theory and Practices Research

This study proposes the ECC methodology to improve design practices systematically. The article describes the research strategy called the evaluation-creation cycle (ECC) the foundation of the ECC methodology. Recent studies showed that a failure of desired outcomes is often a result of a failure of to understand existing practices. This suggests that improving design requires more than a theory of what exists, it also requires using this understanding to change the design process to one that leads from the existing to the desired through the evaluation-creation cycle approach. This requires understanding the relations of knowledge creation through the analytic and the synthetic practices within the design process, as well as the relations between the design process and the outer design context. The study draws insight from the Renaissance theory in order to obtain understanding the development of descriptive ‘knowledge of design’ focused on increasing design understanding, and based on this prescriptive ‘knowledge for design’ providing design support are created. This has informed the development of the evaluation-creation cycle (ECC) strategy and the ECC methodology based on it. The aims of the ECC methodology are the evaluation of existing practices and the principles that support them, and based on this the development of understanding with which to change the current situations into preferred ones. In this article the evaluation-creation cycle (ECC) approach is described and the ECC methodology based on it introduced, and the way in which design principles can be developed, improved and used to predict desired outcomes is discussed.

Evaluating design vouchers in Scotland and the implications for design support in the United Kingdom and Europe

In the decade 2010–19, design featured in 21 of the 28 European Union member states’ innovation policies according to the Bureau of European Design Associations. As we embark on a new decade, it appears that design’s influence within innovation policy and programmes may be waning. What does the design support landscape look like for the United Kingdom in a post-Brexit and post-COVID world? What lessons can be drawn from an evaluation of design vouchers in Scotland for the United Kingdom as a whole and possibly the rest of Europe? This article draws on the experience of User Factor – an EU-funded project on the future of design support in Europe through five knowledge exchange workshops with eight business support organizations as well as a design-led evaluation of the impact of ‘By Design’ vouchers in Scotland among participating companies. In the United Kingdom, the design support landscape is fragmented – design is part of the remit of all the devolved nations’ business support programmes; however, this landscape is complex for small companies to navigate. In Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, design support programmes are currently EU-funded, so it is unclear what programmes will look like after Brexit. ‘By Design’ is a light-touch grant for Scottish companies to access up to £5000 to work with design agencies. Over five years, 618 companies received the grant. The evaluation revealed that design is a relatively low-cost way for companies to innovate as 64 per cent of companies reported bringing a new product or service to market and 27 per cent entered new markets. Furthermore, after the grant, 83 per cent of companies continued to work with a design agency going on to invest £26,000 on average. This demonstrates that a small government grant of up to £5000 can stimulate a fivefold increase in investment. In 2020, design was back on the EU policy agenda as a driver of circular economy and the ‘New European Bauhaus’. Based on the evaluation of the Scottish design vouchers and knowledge exchange between the User Factor partners, we draw out a series of insights and implications for design support in the United Kingdom and across Europe.

Evaluating Quantitative Measures for Assessing Functional Similarity in Engineering Design

The development of example-based design support tools, such as those used for design-by-analogy, relies heavily on the computation of similarity between designs. Various vector- and graph-based similarity measures operationalize different principles to assess the similarity of designs. Despite the availability of various types of similarity measures and the widespread adoption of some, these measures have not been tested for cross-measure agreement, especially in a design context. In this paper, several vector- and graph-based similarity measures are tested across two datasets of functional models of products to explore the ways in which they find functionally similar designs. The results show that the network-based measures fundamentally operationalize functional similarity in a different way than vector-based measures. Based upon the findings, we recommend a graph-based similarity measure such as NetSimile in the early stages of design when divergence is desirable and a vector-based measure such as cosine similarity in a period of convergence, when the scope of the desired function implementation is clearer.