The social context of CAAD in practice

✍ Scribed by Christopher Tweed

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 105 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0926-5805
• DOI: 10.1016/s0926-5805(00)00064-9

✦ Synopsis

The term 'application domain' crops up in many CAAD research papers and yet seldom is the domain described in any detail. In the absence of a detailed understanding of the application domain, CAAD research often substitutes a typical 'designer' or 'architect' as the end-user of developed systems. The end-user's beliefs, norms, values, history and other concrete characteristics are rarely fleshed out beyond a stereotypical, totalising view, which serves as an 'ideal-type' that offers a psychological economy, avoiding the need for us to think too deeply about individual CAAD users. But, as anyone who has taught architecture or worked in practice will be aware, despite many shared interests and attitudes among a given group of designers, there is considerable variation across individuals, not just in skills but in general disposition or 'styles' of comportment, which shape how individuals go about designing. Design research has mostly been blind to such variations. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to begin to fashion a set of questions that will enrich our knowledge and to suggest a framework that can be used to answer them.