Reinventing the wheel? Case study of research into linear/non-linear and framing processes

'No need to reinvent the wheel' and 'it’s just painting by numbers' are expressions used by designers avoiding unnecessarily complex or over-simplistic approaches to design problems. These are extreme scenarios, but practitioners are under increasing pressure to minimise design effort and rationalise designs through repeated application of standardised solutions. This paper deductively tests and analyses interview data from building design case studies against analytical, conjectural and reflective theory models for repeat design solutions. A re-framing process for both clarifying a brief and selecting a design solution is shown to best match the described designer behaviour, with instances of linear analytical and non-linear conjectural processes occurring within that framework. It is inducted that designers in a repeated design adopted a strategy for rationalising the design, which they described as 'modularisation', although this had multiple meanings for different members of the design team. The strategy was driven in part by the ability to use parametric CAD models to duplicate the design. The case study data is based on a series of architecturally sophisticated projects with fairly unique standardised characteristics. This may therefore limit the ability to generalise these findings to more rationalised building types. However the conclusions of this research add to the understanding of approaches adopted by designers using pre-solutions for standardisation.