The Main Factors of Promoting Designerly Thinking (Conventional and Situation-based Thinking) in Teaching the Basics of Architectural Designing

Abstract Generally, design thinking has been defined as an analytic and creative process so that it provides opportunities for experience, creation, receiving comments, and redesigning. Design thinking is linked to the fields such as architecture, designing and art and is also discussed in many disciplines. Among various proposed paradigms, emphasizing on the academic-educational aspect and as one of its defined subcategories, designerly thinking is taken into account as a method based on reasoning which is related to teaching architecture. Due to the complex nature of both teaching and design thinking, their relation includes different delicacies. Although some studies have been conducted on design thinking as a type of thinking, its consideration, inclusion and presence in teaching architecture have not yet been mentioned completely and clearly. The present paper aims at defining the contribution of design thinking in the mentioned descipline through dividing conventional and situation-based thinking, and teaching introductory courses of architecture designing as the basic designing courses. To reach this aim, inference and content analysis of the results of the studies conducted on design thinking, teaching architecture designing to have a better perception of the characteristics, process, and differences between the novices and connoisseurs together with using successful experiences are all necessary things in this discipline. By applying content analysis method (coding process and defining the principal categories) and deductive reasoning, we analyzed the authoritative studies and in order to consider indigenous education and to enjoy the teacher’s opinions, the teachers and scholars’ responses in this regard were analyzed in the completion of the research data. The results of the procedure were explained in three categories: knowledge development, type of statement of the problem and teaching how to reflect (in three branches of self-observance, self-monitoring and self-assessment). Implementation of each category is explained in eight stages and then, the strategies were evaluated by designing a quasi-experimental study between the test and control groups from the students studying at the third semester of bachelor’s degree in the field of architecture. The results are presented in form of three groups including the main strategy, educational designing and monitoring of teaching and assessment for teaching basic designing courses which are significant to the researchers in the fields of teaching, architecture and design thinking.