A DESCRIPTIVE MODEL OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN BEHAVIOR

This dissertation is to be classified as an effort of developing design theories in architecture. A rationalized descriptive model of the organizational structure of architectural design behavior is developed and argued in this effort. The proposed design systems model describes the four basic activities of designing--information-processing, value-judgment, decision-making, and document-production, and their designated roles and systematic interrelationship. The main purpose of the model is to increase the quality of communication in design by clarifying the basic elements and rules of organization of the behavior.;Based on the three categories of descriptive theories, three issues of argument are developed: validity of the axioms employed to develop the model, comprehensive description of componential activities of design by means of the model; and empirical evidences connoted in the model. Design theories of the three categories are identified and investigated to develop the arguments for the corresponding issues. In addition to the analysis of theories, the arguments are supplemented by the author's introspective analysis of daily design activities.;For the result of this dissertation, the design systems model is elaborated on the various levels of description. This provides a comprehensive review of the inter-relationship between existing design theories and the organizational structure of design behavior. This will help architects and researchers clarify what individual theories are about in reference to the organization of design behavior. This dissertation, therefore, provides a way of improving the accessibility and utility of the findings of existing theoretical efforts to the practice of design by proposing an explicit system of inter-relationship.;Existing descriptive theories are analysed in order to develop collaborating evidences for the argument. For the purpose of the argument, existing theories are classified into three categories: "paradigms of design" explaining the ways of looking at design behavior, "micro-theories" describing the individual activities involved in the problem-solving efforts, and "macro-theories" illustrating the operational patterns of actual design behavior. These three levels of descriptions are analysed and integrated in this study in order to elaborate and verify the ideas involved in the proposed model.