Morphological analysis of design emergence in design meetings

There is no consensus within the design research community on how to analyse design meetings. We explored a notable controversy concerning science and design. More specifically, we were interested in exploring whether previously neglected „scientific¿ design methods can be adopted for use as analytic tools for design meetings. A specific method chosen for this purpose were morphological charts. Based on the definition of design by the C-K theory, which states that if there are no concepts there is no design, we have used morphological charts to reconstruct the emergence of design concepts in an architectural and an engineering meeting. This was done by analyzing video recordings of the both types of meetings. Our results indicate that morphological charts are useful for the analysis of design meetings. Besides being capable of presenting the development of design concepts, morphological charts proved to be effective in reducing the time needed to analyze a rich set of data. We believe this complexity reduction offers the possibility of doing research on more (complex) design meetings more effectively, which is beneficial for generalization of findings.