Sources of Architectural Ideation and the Contribution of Each in the Design Process of Architects and Architecture Students (Case study: Architecture students of Shahid Beheshti University)

Indeed, every architectural design idea comes from somewhere or is inspired from some points. Thus, there is a source for ideation. Architectural designers are constantly faced with ambiguous and complex situations. Therefore, their minds usually fly to a given point after encountering design problems, and the preparations and requirements of the ideation appear as a function in the design process. Ideation can be involved in all stages in a thinking cycle, including innovation, development, and the realization of an idea. Although there are some essential notions in the architectural design process that are not easily distinguished separately, each of them has its exclusive meaning. Some of these seemingly similar definitions including, an idea, a concept, a primary generator, or an initial generator; and, architectural contributors such as designers, professors, instructors, and the students who are under the education of architecture in an academic institution or university use them a lot. This mentioned issue illuminates the importance of the vital role of ideation in the architectural design process. Besides, providing a worldwide cognition of ideation and its crucial role in the architectural design process can lead researchers to accomplish a variety of comprehensive investigations. After introducing the ideation as an essential activity in the design process, some questions should be answered. For Example, what are the sources of architectural design ideation, and what are their contributions to the process of ideas’ forming? Responding to these mentioned questions, an article entitled “the sources of architectural ideation, focusing on the professional architects’ ideation processes” has already been pursued. The present research, has made an effort to answer the above questions by focusing on the architecture students' ideation process in different academic degrees and years. In this way, a more realistic view of the ideation sources comes in to picture, and it becomes possible to compare the expert and novice designers' performance. For the field studies of this present essay, the ideation of architectural design processes of 121 architecture students of Shahid Beheshti University was examined as the case studies. As the subjects of this statistical analysis, these selected students consisted of the first-year undergraduates to the four-year undergraduates studying in their bachelor’s at that time, and the first-year and the second-year students of master’s degree. After completing the data gatherings, categorizing, and analyzing, the primary sources of ideation among the architectural students were appraised based on the influential factors in idea production. These are the factors assigned to the design problem, and the factors assigned to designers. In other words, it turned out that their ideation sources were divided into two categories of “design problem-oriented factors” and “designer-oriented factors”. Furthermore, their shares were defined after the descriptive and extrapolative statistical analysis of gained data. It showed that the design problems factors have a higher contribution to the idea formation of the students. Although this finding corresponds with the research of the professional architects, among the students, the ratio of the "design problem-oriented factors" to the "designer-oriented-factors" is impressively higher than the expert designers.