Morphological Overviews and Tectonic Design

Tectonics is an important parameter of quality within the building world. Tectonics covers the co-evolution of the design and production. The technology employed in the making involves multi-disciplinary design teams in order to integrate the contributions from different disciplines. The information exchange between participants within the design process is increasingly becoming more and more intense. In our recent work we aim to support design activities within this highly complex process with a framework for structuring the design process - the ID (Integral Design). This method is based on working with Morphological Overviews (MO) and forms the basis for supporting the generation of conceptual ideas by structuring ever increasing communication between design team members and stimulating multi-disciplinary knowledge exchange to be implemented in the design results. Testing this theoretical idea in practice was done through workshops for professionals from the Royal Institute of Dutch Architects (BNA) and the Dutch Association of Consulting Engineers (ONRI), wherein over the last 5 years more than 250 professionals have participated. By discussing the concept and results of some of these workshops and showing how some of the elements of this approach are (implicitly) used in architectural practice, the paper focuses on how other disciplines than architecture can add their knowledge and experience to tectonics.