Architectural design in digital media: Designing the design

This thesis explores the concept of Computer Aided Design through design theory, nature of the design problems and digital media in a design computation context. CAD technologies evolved a great deal since they were first introduced in the mid 1960's. During this period, espcially nowadays, CAD and digital media are used not only for drafting but also became a design medium itself. This change is naturally a paradigm change for design theory, since, beside the designer's individual talent and work, the process and methods used for the design play an important role on the shaping of the final product. With the shift from traditional design media (pen&paper) to the digital media, designers need to have new capabilities to combine with their intuition and creativity in the process. The availability of digital media offered designers new opportunities, new methods differentiating from old traditional methods which enabled them to develop personal design strategies in the design process.. In this context, in the present study, an overview of the design theory is represented. Furthermore, the structure of design problems and the concept of sketching, which has a vital role in traditional design process are also explored. To form a basis for digitally mediated design, basic constraints of digital media, representation of new forms in computer graphics, the basic geometric transformations used for both analyzing and generating architectural composition are examined in a descriptive manner. In order to comprehend the essence of the change in design theory, the design computation concepts which form a basis for the change (algorithm, analogies between architecture and language, formal grammars and languages, shape grammars) are scrutinized. The focus of the last chapter is the design process of Grand Egyptian Museum, a competition project by Beraha H., Vlora O. and Özdaş C. Here, the methods designers developed and their applications in the process are studied.Keywords: Design theory, sketch, digital media, temsil, computational design.