Design decision support for the conceptual phase of the design process

Design is a complex process that depends very much on the information about the design task to perform. At the early design stages, usually only conceptual sketches and schematics are available, often rough and incomplete. Still at the early stages of design the most important decisions have to be taken. This leads to an information contradiction: almost no information s available and yet most of the decisions have to be taken. Integral design is meant to overcome this problem of lacking information at the start of the design process by providing methods to communicate the consequences of design steps across the different disciplines involved in the design process. The Integral Design Methodology, based on the Methodical Design approach, is meant to support all disciplines in the design process with information about the tasks and the decisions of the other design disciplines involved in the design process. Supplying and exchanging explanations about the decisions taken during the design process will improve understanding of the combined efforts by all the designer parties. In particular the use of the morphological overviews combined with the Kesselring method as a decision support tool will help to structure the early conceptual steps within the design process and make decisions taken during the design process more transparent for all the people involved. This method is used in 2 workshops and in different MSc theses at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven and shows promising results.