STAGE-BASED DESIGN BRIEFING BEYOND THE WATERFALL MODEL Tracing students' design processes in relation to prescribed design stages throughout an architectural design studio

Based on visualisations of data obtained from field observations, this paper describes and discusses how a group of ten undergraduate students of architecture negotiated their ways through the tutorials of a design studio lasting 17 weeks. The main question guiding this empirical study is how the initially prescribed linear, stage-based framework of the design studio relates to design processes as experienced by participating students and as observed by myself as tutor and participant observer. Visualisations of tutorial observations show that instead of proceeding from one stage to the next sequentially, students tend to engage in continuous and parallel re-consideration of almost all aspects of their work. This results in a process that can be described as a cumulative and layered process, and illustrated as 'fan'-shaped diagrams. The role of the design stages initially scheduled in the detailed studio brief seems to be to gradually introduce students to increasingly advanced and challenging project scopes rather than to enforce sequential design steps.