“Thinking Out of the Box” from Out of the Box! Increasing the Dimension of “Starting Point” Case Study: Architecture Students

Abstract

To start a design process with plan and section in 2D environment (pen and paper) will exclude thousands of possibilities, which the designer will never be able to consider them. The 2D designer will never touch upon the rich world of complexity. Starting the design from higher dimension is the solution to get rid of old conventional designing methods. Adding extra dimension to the “starting point” is applying CAD (computer aided architectural design) software not to extrude the 2D lines, but thinking from a higher dimension. Now thinking out of the box from out of the box becomes possible. To prove the hypothesis, authors decided to conduct an experiment and asked a group of architecture students to design a same architectural task with different dimensions. First the conventional pen and paper in 2D and the second time applying 3D environment interface of their own choice for the same task. The jury of experts concluded that students were more creative when they chose a 3D interface (higher dimension).