Linus Tan

• PhD
• Lecturer, Architecture and Design at Swinburne University of Technology

This paper proposes that designers can improve their collaboration effectiveness by foster team learning behaviours. Most of the design collaboration literature is on how to effectively transmit information between members. Team learning literature, however, covers how to effectively transmit, understand, refine and retransmit information between m...

This paper examines the role of Reflective Practice and Team Learning when architecture teams pitch their proposals in a design competition. Pitching proposals is significant to architects because pitching designs in competitions is one of the ways architects procure jobs. Previous researchers used the principles of Reflective Practice to describe...

In 1983, Donald Schön published his seminal work, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. The book emerged during the peak of the Design Methods movement, when works like L. Bruce Archer's Systematic Method for Designers and Herbert A. Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial argued for recognizing design processes as scientif...

Architects use a range of tools, from the traditional pencil to Virtual Reality technologies to prototype and articulate their creative designs. In recent years, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) software has reached the mainstream and there is an exponential appearance of GenAI images that portray architectural designs. This article docum...

This study describes the design and evaluation of a Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) digital mentor tailored for Early Career Researchers (ECRs). Despite the proven benefits of mentorships for ECRs, access to effective mentorship remains limited due to constraints on experienced researchers' time and their varying mentorship skills. Drawi...

Many of today's global problems are complex and difficult to solve-some may even be impossible. They are characterized by interconnectedness, non-linear causality, and a lack of clear solutions or definitive answers. Designing for such complex problems is unavoidable, but doing so without understanding biases and the repercussions of one's design e...

I spent the last decade or so working in the higher education sector in various capacities. It was not until February 2023 that I was lucky enough to attain the coveted tenure-track academic position. Before this role, I worked at four different Australian universities as a sessional tutor, a casual and remote research assistant, a professional sta...

This research examines how a New Product Development (NPD) design team incorporated multidisciplinary knowledge to redesign a modular cab. Design teams that implement digital innovation often use cutting edge techniques, such artificial intelligence and big data, to inform their design decisions. However, these techniques are often managed by other...

This study explores the application of image generative AI to support design process by creating inspiration boards. Through an evaluative study, we compare the diversity, quantity, fidelity, and ambiguity of boards generated by image generative AI and traditional methods. The results highlight how generative AI produces a quantity of images, it ex...

This practice-based research is a visitor experience engagement framework applied in cultural institutions. We revisit O’Doherty`s (1999) Inside the White Cube as a lens to the attention-experience economy. The White Cube precedes digital technology and 24/7 contemporaneous experiences. What principles derived from the ‘White Cube’ inform contempor...

This case study describes the integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into a design workflow that envisions future scenarios for concept development. While image-based GenAI tools like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion have garnered attention from designers for their ability to visualise ideas rapidly, integrating textual GenAI, lik...

Two models have emerged for retaining heritage elements in the redevelopment of Melbourne’s (CBD). The most common model is facadism, which involves developers retaining the exterior walls of the building but completely replacing the interior. There are academic debates about whether facadism adequately retains the heritage integrity of the buildin...

Affordances are cues to the actual and possible actions in the environment influenced by our experiences (Gibson, 1979, 2014). Harry Heft explains affordances as 'perceptible properties of the environment that have functional significance for an individual' (Heft, 2010, p.18). The significant elements of the environment framed by the context of a p...

Designing with experiences is integral, but when done casually, can lead to haphazard outcomes. The loss in translation of experiences from context and discipline through design research risks devaluing the significance of design research epistemologies. This research elaborates the issue of using experience as data, inputs, inspirational source in...

This research demonstrates how I introduced the Theory of Experience (Roth & Jornet, 2013) to create a novel architectural design process in a design studio context. Architects often seek to create spaces that not only fulfill functional requirements but also evoke memorable experiences for users. During the concept design phase, architects imagine...

Reflection is a crucial step in developing a critical designer. This conversation probes traditional methods of facilitating reflections in design education and discusses future reflective practices, particularly in a time where students can use generative Artificial Intelligence software to quickly produce "reflective" essays. There were five desi...

In this paper, I devised and embedded textual Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into a design approach to digitally translate stories into design concepts. This approach allows design students to brainstorm ideas variedly and quickly based on a story and scope out design opportunities. Currently, design students manually conceptualise idea...

Architects produce models, sketches, and digital renderings to visualise the design for the end users to imagine the space. Occasionally, these mediums prompt clients to articulate their memories and experiences activated by the visual cues in the image. However, understanding how visualisations afford spatial memories and experiences is rarely con...

Digital design tools and technologies offer new opportunities for designers to generate a diverse range of design solutions. Previous research have discussed the multifaceted use of such technologies for 1) rapid visualisations, 2) generating design options, and 3) predicting design solutions. However, such research have focused more on simplifying...

In this paper, we explore the role of machine learning (ML) as a design material in prototyping new aircraft designs. This will be increasingly significant in the future, as new industry looks to meet the emerging demands of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). With increasing budget constraints, regulations and lengthy certification processes, traditional...

This paper examines the role of team learning behaviours in the performance of architecture teams. This is significant to architects because most architects work in project teams. Although there is a growing body of research on the behaviours of design teams, this survey is one of the first studies conducted specifically on the learning behaviours...

Recent advancements in computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) have influenced architects to practice more purposeful design processes. However, most previous research have focused on innovating CAD and CAM technologies and less on how to automate the specific needs of users into design-to-fabrication processes. Therefore...

This study describes how a multidisciplinary team at an Australian university's innovation hub developed their research targets and capacity. The process through which research teams establish their research targets and strategies for achieving them is often tacit, which makes process sharing challenging. Referencing Situated Learning Theory (Brown...

This paper grapples with complicities of decolonising as we attempt to unsettle Dominant conventions in Design, which ossify through repetition, such as reoccurring conferences. Such conventions are troubled through questions around labour, privilege and ethics of being present and situated when we come together to share our practices on unceded In...

Emerging leaders are high-performing staff that show great promise as a leader. They often represent their senior leadership team in driving strategy. They also support on-the-ground staff in the day-today operations. This represents a dichotomy of skills and qualities expected of emerging leaders. While there are many training programmes available...

Universities struggle to commercialise scientific research. However, designers can help scientists bridge the research-market gap in different ways. Although the value design can bring to science is understood, how design outputs deliver value to scientific research remains unexplored. Our paper reports findings from a designer-scientist collaborat...

Many design studios globally teach architectural design using the master-apprentice model. A studio leader assigns an open-ended project brief to students and guides them through a design process to resolve the brief and propose a design outcome. Unsurprisingly, many studio leaders implement groupwork to prepare students for the current collaborati...

OVERVIEW This project explores learning and reflection practices in architecture teams. When architects use reflection-on-action, they learn from experience. When they use reflection-in-action, they learn from experiencing. Such reflective practices help architects build project knowledge and deliver their project. But most architects work in teams...

Do professional design services offer a service or design a product? A traditional definition rooted in the service economy might point to the former, but the theory of Service-Dominant Logic from marketing might suggest the latter. While this may appear purely as a semantic difference, it has severe implications on 1) how designers articulate the...

This study examines the benefits and challenges of creating partnerships between schools and their local maker community. Makerspaces are dedicated facilities for individuals to create products with specialised tools that vary greatly in different spaces. This paper focuses on makerspaces with technologies that facilitate fabrication. Based on inte...

This paper shows the importance and value of ambiguity to reveal opportunities hidden in problems and the manner in which ambiguity is removed from applications of design thinking. It describes the value of introducing, sustaining and using ambiguity and explains the different types of ambiguity. It follows up by describing the events when a design...

Increases in computation power have allowed design software to be-come more complex. At the same time, big data and artificial intelligence, ques-tion the traditional tools of the human designer. Morphogenetic prototyping pro-vides a method for designers to control this complexity by separating the design into pseudo developmental stages to enable...