Towards unmanned cargo ships: A task based design process to identify economically viable low and unmanned ship concepts

Unmanned and low-manned transport has increasingly been studied this past decade. While there have been successful trials for autonomous navigation, unmanned cargo ships are not commercially available yet. First, this dissertation investigates how changes to a ship’s systems and organizational structure can affect the crew’s size and composition...

anchoring the design process: A framework to make the designerly way of thinking explicit in architectural design education

This thesis proposes a framework to address the design process in design education. Building upon the assumption that teachers, being professional designers, do not discuss the design process in the architectural design studio and do not have a vocabulary to do so, five generic elements or anchor points are defined which represent the basic...

Collaborative architectural design in virtual reality

In this PhD research a method and software prototype is developed for COLlaborative Architectural Design In VIRtual reality. The method consists of developing versions of a concept for a building and the evaluation of them with criteria. Every team member makes his own versions; otherwise they would destroy each others work. They can evaluate...

Context Knowledge: Supporting Designers' Information Search in the Early Design Phases

Large amounts of data, information and knowledge are used during a design process. And it is proven from past researches that the absence of context is one of the reasons of the difficulties of utilizing data, information and knowledge in a design. This research work explored the concept of context that has been used in various domains and...

Coordinating collaborative building design