Where does the starting point of design activity lie? Today, the distinction between those who commission others to design facilities such as buildings (clients) and those who undertake such commissions as design professionals (designers) has forced designers to be aware of the starting point of their design activities and the preconditions before they begin designing.

When a designer designs and constructs a house for himself to live in by himself, he or she seems to be able to practice his or her design activities freely without worrying too much about the starting point of his or her design and its preconditions because the client and designer are the same. However, even in such a case, as soon as the designer decides to install electricity, gas, water, and other facilities necessary for modern living, he or she will be in the position of the client and will have to accurately convey his or her intentions and needs to the specialized contractor for electricity, gas, water, and other facilities, and request the contractor to design and construct the facilities. In this case, the specialist contractor, as the designer, must accurately understand the client’s intentions and needs, and design and construct based on those intentions. However, in the case of many houses, the client will probably ask a company specializing in housing to handle all the work related to the facility.

For the designers of these specialized companies, the starting point of their design activities is when they receive a formal request for design from the client. At that point, they must understand and document the client’s objectives, needs, and challenges, and they must repeatedly make revisions until they reach an agreement with the client. The agreed-upon document is called a design datum in Japan, but in the United States it is called a program, and the process is called programming. The term “program” is said to have been first used in the field of architecture around 1865 when an architectural competition was held in London to build a new courthouse (Sanoff, 1977).

A design project for a facility comprises a series of phases: program development, preliminary design phase, production phase, construction phase, and evaluation phase after completion. This flow is also called the design process (Sanoff, 1977, p.184).

William Pena and his colleague John W. Focke, co-managers of the architecture firm Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS), were the first to propose the framework of solving problems between the clients and the designer as “problem seeking.” Pena and his colleagues, under the tutelage of William Wayne Caudill, their mentor at Texas A&M University and founder of CRS, systematized the rationale, principles, methods, and so on as a theoretical foundation of problem seeking through his 20 years of design practice at CRS and published a book entitled Problem Seeking: New Directions in Architectural Programming in 1969.

In this book, Pena et al. positioned the process of design activities using the problem seeking method as pre-design architectural programming. In the pre-design architectural programming phase, “problem seeking” refers to a common framework that aims to match the client’s decision-making with the designer’s design criteria. In this framework, the client clarifies the vague goals, deliverables, preconditions, and constraints for the project to client requirements, and the designer sets them as his or her own design criteria.

In the problem seeking process, the designer, through communication with the client, defines the five steps (goals, the establishment of goals; facts, the collection and analysis of facts; concepts, the discovery and verification of concepts; needs, the determination of needs; and problem, the presentation of issues). For each of these steps, information on function, form, economy, and time is collected, analyzed, and discussed, and the results of this discussion are documented as the design datum. In problem seeking, because the users of the facility to be designed are also important members of the project, the objectives, needs, values, and behaviors of the various people involved in the project become important design criteria for creating alternatives to the planned facility. In addition, this document will provide a basis for the evaluation of the facility by those who will be affected by it after it is completed.

The starting point of the design activity is when the client formalizes the requirements regarding the objectives, needs, and constraints for the deliverables of the design project and the designer strives to accurately understand the contents of these requirements through communication with the client, project stakeholders, and others. During this process, the designer analyzes the information using various methods and documents such as the design datum and reaches a consensus with the client. This process is referred to as “programming” in the Japanese workplace design field, and its deliverable is a “design specification.”

If the client and the designer do not agree on the design specifications, it is not possible to progress to the next initial design phase. However, because of time constraints, budgetary issues, communication conflicts, or some other reasons, the design specifications are sometimes agreed upon in a half-hearted state, and the next initial design phase is moved. In such cases, problems arise during the next fabrication or construction phase, forcing design changes. Pena and colleagues must have experienced such troublesome cases firsthand through their 20 years of design practice at CRS and devised and presented the problem seeking method to reduce the hardship as much as possible.

In today’s world, the amount of information has increased exponentially beyond human processing capacity, technology has become more advanced, and people’s values have become more diverse. In addition, design projects are becoming more interdisciplinary and international and comprise multiple specialists. Under these circumstances, the amount of information, diversity, and uncertainty with which designers must deal in programming has increased. It has become difficult for inexperienced designers to accurately understand the objectives, needs, and constraints of clients and project stakeholders. Therefore, various methods related to programming will become increasingly important in the future, such as methods for collecting and analyzing a huge amount of information using ICT technology, documenting design requirements, and communicating to reach a consensus.

（TOGO Yasushi）

Related Classes

Industrial Design Course, Service Design

Industrial Design Course, Practice of Service Design

Strategic Design Course, Design Project Manegement

References

• Faatz, S. (2009) “Architectural Programming: Providing Essential Knowledge of Project Participants Needs in the Pre-Design Phase,” Technology and Management in Construction: An international journal, pp. 80-85.
• Henry, S. (1997) Methods of Architectural Programming, Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, 1st Edition.
• Pena, William, M., John W. Focke (1969) Problem Seeking: New Directions in Architectural Programming, Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS), 1st Edition.