Suchergebnisse

Social discourse regarding design issues evolves in the contexts of the scholarly arena, the city hall, the courts, the public media, and the use/action realm or everyday life. Design review, narrowly conceived, is one of the formal mechanisms within the broader context of this social discourse. In this conception, the impact of design review on the physical environment is direct and immediate but specific and limited in scope. Altematively, it can also be considered as a generic process encompassing any or all instances of collective and critical reflection on design issues. These diverse processes may appear to lack coherence, but they have a much more fundamental and lasting effect because they shape the tacit assumptions and beliefs underlying our more direct actions. Here the broader context of design review will be considered. Following a discussion of the spatial scene, the evolution of three constructs during the past three decades-place, sustainability, and participation-into full-blown paradigms is summarized. It is shown that the three together are converging into a worldview that is taking hold globally. This emerging worldview, then, provides the grounds and the backing for substantive and procedural discussion of planning and design review.

This article examines the attitudes of studio instructors in architecture and landscape architecture departments throughout the United States toward the designer's role, sources of knowledge and inspiration in design, related disciplines, and essential skills. A cluster analysis of instructors' responses to a questionnaire identified five groups according to conceptions of professional identity: master designers, communicative designers, political designers, researcher designers, and those who see design, research, and political skills as almost equally important. The two most common self-conceptions are "master" and "negotiator." In-depth interviews with some instructors further elucidated each approach. The results revealed the coexistence of a multiplicity of ideas and convictions within a shared ethos and suggested various strategies for increasing the effectiveness of design education and practice. The article concludes that the professional identity of designers is being transformed from that of isolated creative individuals to that of politically active professionals.