Enriching creativity in digital architectural design: A hybrid digital design toolset as a catalyst for design emergence in early-stage explorations of complex forms

Although conceptual design is one of the most important stages of creation, impacting the quality and cost of the final product, current research indicates that designers still lack adequate tools supporting early-stage design. This research challenges that notion, by proposing a hybrid digital design platform for conceptual architectural design. The platform contains four miscellaneous techniques: animation, free-form modelling, associative parametric modelling and performance-driven modelling. In a digital design experiment we demonstrate that the collective application of these techniques to early-stage design explorations intensifies the architect’s visual and cognitive reasoning processes, and hence supports the emergence of promising design artefacts which bear the traces of all the techniques applied in the course of their conception. Additionally, the study also points at some other promising virtues of the hybrid toolset, including: provision of diversified form-finding opportunities on various levels of design abstraction; the potential to direct designers onto unplanned creation paths; the ability to increase the versatility and functionality of the solutions; and the capacity to sustain design activities of various character, ranging from highly intuitive ones to very rational ones. \ua9 2015, The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong