Author:

Keywords:

architectural design, connectionism, self-organisation

Abstract:

In architecture, design ideas are developed as much through interaction as by individuals in isolation. This awareness inspired the development of a Dynamic Architectural Memory On-line, an interactive platform to share ideas, knowledge and insights in the form of concrete building projects among designers in different contexts and at different levels of expertise. Interaction with various user groups revealed this platform to suffer from at least two thresholds. First of all, making projects available to other platform users takes time, effort, and specific skills. Secondly, designers tend to sense a psychological threshold to share their ideas and insights with others. In trying to tackle both thresholds, this paper proposes to conceive the platform as an associative network of projects, and develops ideas about how the relationships in this network can be determined and updated by exploiting the insights implicitly available in the project documentation and user (inter)actions. In the long run, this should allow the platform to learn from all designers using the platform, including those who do not release information on their own projects, and to apply the lessons learned to continuously enhance its performance.