Heart and mind: The role of time in design related decisions

Heart and mind: The role of time in design related decisions

Volker, L.

Architecture and The Built Environment

Real Estate and Housing

2013-05-05

We make numerous decisions every day. Some decisions are based on a range of explicit and material alternatives, others are constructed from implicit ideas about the options we have in mind. In preparing a construction project, creating a vision on how the future would look like appears to be one of the most important activities. This is usually done through design sketches. This paper focuses on the interaction between people and the alternatives they face when make decisions that relate to the built environment. My argument is built upon two research traditions - valuing design from a cognitive perspective and psychological processes of decision making, and exemplary empirical observations from my previous work. First the concepts of architectural design quality and value dimensions of a product are addressed, bringing us back to the essentials of Vitruvius. Then I show how sensemaking and intuitive decision making do justice to the complexity and ambiguity of making design related decisions. In the conclusion I argue that value judgements should be considered as a result of the interaction between a product and an individual person in the context of a group or society. Consequently value judgements are essential in sensemaking processes leading to decisions. They integrate arguments from the heart and the mind, leading to particular preferences among individuals. Since decisions are often considered satisfactory for the moment, but outmoded the next, time plays an essential role in creating meaning of design related situations.

decision making
design
intuition
sensemaking
time

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:724b5819-be7b-4a67-abc7-d5c0382cb3cd

International Council for Building (CIB)

978-0-9875542-0-8

Proceedings of the 19th CIB World Building Congress 2013 "Construction and Society", Brisbane, Australia, 5-9 May 2013

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2013 The Author(s)