Designing through conversations - How to invite others to participate in the project and what this opens up

If we follow Donald Schön, the design process in architecture can be seen as a reflective conversation with, what he calls, the materials of a design situation. Based on that, we would like to explore a wider vision of what a conversation can be and how different type of conversations affect the design process and what we learn from it. This expansion challenges the notion of actors participating in the conversation as well as the notion of materials that represents the situation we engage in when designing. We will share processes that we’ve been engaged in, with students, through different design & build and live project studios organised at ULiège Faculty of Architecture. Those studios explore three entangled challenges: collaborative design, users oriented design and means oriented design.