Morphological chart as a tool for analysis: A study on structural solutions, design types and disciplinary mindsets in design education

Abstract

Different design disciplines such as architecture, urban design, and industrial design, do have commonalities and differences. The similarities are more prominent at the beginning of a design student's journey of undergraduate design education, with learning basic design in a similar manner. However, observations of design lecturers have been suggesting that there might be differences in these students' designs, even at the beginning of their undergraduate education where they are just exposed to foundation courses of basic design and not exposed to their own disciplinary knowledge yet. These disciplinary differences are in the form of morphological differences in design. In order to find out if these departmental and disciplinary differences in the morphology of design are verifiable with numbers, the outputs of a study have been used. The study that have been used in this thesis is a part of the foundation course in the Faculty of Architecture in Istanbul Technical University. Students from 5 different design departments are enrolled in the same course and they all encounter the same design problems from different design disciplines. This helps them learn to work in an interdisciplinary setting and to understand the problem-solving methods that these other design departments use. In this case, the students were asked to make a tea serving tray which hangs from one point, which is a structural problem given by industrial design lecturers of this foundation course. The output of this course project, which are tea tray designs of students from these five departments, are used as the data in this thesis. This tea tray design data of students has been converted into machine readable sub-solutions of design features of the object, by using morphological chart method. Morphological Chart (MC) is a design method used for finding many solutions to a defined problem. It is an idea generation method, normally used at the beginning of the process of design. The solutions in the Morphological Chart are found and added by deconstructing the problem to its sub- functions and generating alternative solutions to these sub-functions. This method is implemented in the form of a grid; with sub-functions being on the vertical axis and solutions being on the horizontal axis. Although the method works on dividing the problem and then offering solutions piece by piece; the pieces are combined through a selective process and integrated in the end. The overall nature of the method depends on problem solving and generating an analytical framework to be able to comprehend the whole universe of solutions. In this thesis, Morphological Chart method is used to analyse existing designs in a systematic way, rather than the generation of new ideas. This use is demonstrated through the study, using the outputs of the foundation course in design, which involves more than 300 students' designs. This design data is evaluated and visually summarised with the created morphological chart. The categories used in this analysis are of the parts or features of the tea tray, such as the shape of the handle, the tray surface, how many cups it can carry, and how many layers are there in the tray. This data is combined with the data of the students' design disciplines to find the preferences of these five design disciplines: architecture, industrial design, interior architecture, landscape architecture, and urban and regional planning. This combined data is then analysed and the percentages of each different sub-solution -such as trays with circular base, triangular base, and rectangular base in the case of the tray shape category- are found out as a result. I have found out that students from different design departments, even though they are at the beginning of their education and have had just faculty common foundation courses in 1st and 2nd semesters and just began to have some departmental courses in their 3rd semester, which is when the data of tea tray designs were gathered, do have differences in solutions in the parts of the structural problem. The main differences were in the markings on the tray (whether there are holes, guides, or slots keeping cups in place), and handle type/shape of the tray. This can be explained with what we called a disciplinary mindset, which is about the mindset that these students have about becoming a professional in their specific design fields. Necessary steps to follow in order to construct a morphological chart for analysing existing designs are also defined in this thesis. This use of the morphological chart can enable easier market research, visualization of design data, and the output which is the morphological chart itself can be used as an input for both idea creation methods for designers, and it can be transferred to a spreadsheet as the input of a computer-generated design software or artificial intelligence applications. In addition to that, a guideline for a new version of the morphological chart method, which involved combining or eliminating sub functions for novel idea creation, has been made and added to the thesis for the future use of all designers, design educators, and design researchers. In addition to the analysis done with the morphological chart, some typologies of design within the students' design presentation boards were observed as clusters. These clusters are then named through a visual analysis of the boards. Since the data was large, with more than 300 tea tray designs, each design has been made into a sketch for faster and a more uniform analysis. An iconic analysis of these sketches was then made. This analysis resulted in the final names of the design typologies of students'tea tray designs. With the help of the data from the first analysis of this thesis, which included the students' departments; the departmental differences and the typologies according to these disciplines have also been investigated. This resulted in the results with the differences in the typologies as percentages; which department's students used which typology the most. This analysis similarly shows that, even at the beginning of their undergraduate studies, students' designs are influenced by their disciplinary mindset.