Enhancing Design Sensitivity and Creativity in the Detailing and Materialisation Stages of the Design Process through Specific Models and Prototypes

In design education, detailing and materialisation activities are often underemphasised in a structured design process. Educators tend to teach students to focus on defining problems, developing creative design solution, as well as communicating the “nearly completed designs” through modes of holistic and refined representation, which misconceptually creates a perception of completeness among stakeholders. One of the main reasons are that time constraints in the detailing and materialisation activities, initiated other modes of presentation, which are faster, such as CAD, but lacks tactility and interactivity. Moreover, students’ misconceptions that creative “award -winning” explorations mainly take place in the idea and conceptualisation stages are myths, which need to be seriously addressed in design education. The aim of this article is to propose a systematic approach for design practice and education to select the most appropriate models and prototypes to facilitate divergence, creativity and focus in the detailing and materialisation stages of the designing process. Moreover, as students and junior designers tend to converge towards concrete solutions quite early in the design process once detailing and materialisation work in being emphasised and prioritised, the authors propose to maintain an intensive cognitive and descriptive approach for analyzing design problems and generating solutions, followed by a strict process of idea generation and conceptualisation. However this, strict development process should be compensated through a more extended divergence and convergence process in the detailing and materialisation stages using models and prototypes, complemented by a “master” and “apprenticeship” interactions between student and faculty which give ample room for hermeneutic inquiry and design reasoning.