This review focuses on the research paper ‘Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms’ (Henderson and Clark, 1990). Radical and incremental innovations have long been the corner stone of which firms base their knowledge of technological innovations. However, the research paper serves to shed light on one of the less evident forms of innovation – Architectural Innovation. Architectural innovations are, as defined by Henderson and Clark, an innovation that change the way in which components of a product are linked together, while leaving the core design concepts untouched (Pg. 1, Para 5). In other words, architectural innovation destroys the usefulness of a firm’s architectural knowledge, but preserves the usefulness of its knowledge about individual product components. The paper argues that the inability of firms to identify and recognise new interactions between components has serious competitive consequences. The argument is exemplified in the photolithographic industry, where one after another, firms lost thei...
The business model for IDEO began as an open-minded place to design, develop and manufacture new products. The last 20 years of proven product design driven by innovation has translated into profit margins for their clients and continuous refinement for IDEO’s process. IDEO pioneered “concurrent engineering” where design and engineering work together to produce aesthetically pleasing products that are also highly functional. This was different from many other similar companies that placed more emphasis on the industrial design than the engineering. IDEO’s strengths grew out of the ability to master this ability with high tech clients. Corporations came to IDEO because they had a proven system of developing the best products through using their key ingredients for innovative strategy.
The Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei (I.M) is known as one of the greatest architects of the Twentieth Century. His long, brilliant career was highlighted by several internationally famous structures. While many of Pei’s buildings were generally accepted by the public, some of them precipitated fair amounts of controversy. The most notable of these controversial structures is his Glass Pyramid at the entrance of the Louvre in Paris. For these reasons, I.M. Pei seems to be an architect who exhibits interest in the avant-garde through both the creative design and aestheticism of his architecture.
This explains why for ‘many directors, commercial and industrial architecture are just a necessary shell for their business processes’ (Susanne-Knittel Ammerschuber (2006) pg10). They consider dimensions for example surfaces, floor levels and converted space to be the stand out feature of this corporate architecture. Through doing this, the architectural ethos is overlooked during design. The architectural potential is therefore limited as it tends to overlook the surrounding context; the urban environment, local identity as well as the surrounding landscape design. Instead it...
are used as the integral components of the architectural design, this reflecting a conceptual cohesion that is missed in previous architecture.
Transition in a social sense is a change from one system into another. Globally, the modernist paradigm changed to the post-modern with the disappearance of central authorities, universal dogmas and foundational ethics. The post-modern world introduced fragmentation, instability, indeterminacy and insecurity. Architectural responses to these conditions occurred as a 'semantic nightmare' of the post-modern discourse and/or the attempted completion of 'the modern project'.
Today, advances in technology and design are providing many opportunities for new and existing businesses to re-invent themselves and their marketing strategies.
The existing individualistic culture was one that had developed around a product development need. Whilst smaller “silos” were indeed conducive to supporting the flexibility and innovation inherent in this culture, and suitable for the creation of a wider array of product designs within the existing firm, they proved to foster a degree of duplication of efforts as well as the limiting knowledge sharing throughout the organisation. New ventures require the support of the parent company and its resources and this needed to be changed for the success of DMPS.
of digital technologies not only as production process and design techniques but also as the way of thinking. Computer is an exciting new graphic medium and a research instrument that permits rapid visualization of design but it is unable to explore design, theory and systematic methods. Professionals use digital technology to improve the effectiveness in practice and for better performance of design/build process. Technology affects architects on two planes – first at skill level, second at level of work processes and professional culture.(1). Architects are bound to perform creative, imaginative , intuitive acts, but are forced to do many things that are non-creative and done by some kind of slave i.e. the computer.
“Shorter product life cycles, the pressure on prices, or the high costs of research and development for better products have made it difficult for today’s companies to prevail against their competitors in the contest for profits” [15].
With the interaction between the development of computational approaches in architecture and the contemporary forms of spatial design intelligence, some new architectural design theories emerged to make differences between architects and control designing processes. These theories are almost employed in all designing realms, from architecture to urban design to provide fields of ideas and solutions that privilege by complexity. Most of these theories are oriented to relay on understanding and using computational methods to generate exotic and complex geometries. In this respect, three of these theories will discussed and tested against three buildings. The theories are: parametric design, genetic architecture and emergence, which characterize some of the contemporary architectural design approaches.
Abstract: Contemporary architects have a wide variety of sources to gain inspiration from, but this has not always been the case. How did modernism effect sources of inspiration? What did post-modernism do to liberate the choice of influences? Now that Contemporary architects have the freedom of choice, how are they using “traditional” styles and materials to inspire them? Even after modernism why are traditional styles still around?
A new product on the market may look all shiny and new and be appealing to customers but what is the story behind the product and what is the underlying future for this product. Where were the original materials from? Is it all legalised? Where did the manufacturing take place? How was the product manufactured? These are all questions that are never properly addressed in the design industry and are just simply overlooked. They are the aspects of designing and producing a new product that need to be carefully looked at to make a good design, and to make sustainable products.
There are 25 major specialties in engineering that are recognized by professional societies. In any one of those 25 specialties, the goal of the engineer is the same. The goal is to be able to come up with a cost effective design that aids people in the tasks they face each day. Whether it be the coffee machine in the morning or the roads and highways we travel, or even the cars we travel in, it was all an idea that started with an engineer. Someone engineered each idea to make it the best solution to a problem. Even though engineer’s goals are similar, there are many different things that engineers do within their selected field of engineering. This paper will focus on the architectural field of engineering.
What makes modern architecture? Before answering this, one would need to understand what the term “modern” exactly describes. In architecture, modernism is the movement or transition from one period to another, and it is caused by cultural, territorial, and technological changes happening in the world. In Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History, he details these three major societal changes that impact and create modern architecture.
The role of the architect is a question that evokes a spectrum of answers from Norman Foster’s definition; ‘Architect is an expression of values… the way we build is a reflection of the way we live.’ [Foster, cited in Tholl, 2014: Online] This debate of who and what an architect should be and do is not a recent one to emerge but has lead many architects and designers as far back as Vitruvius [15BC] to produce documentation on what they believed to be the make-up of an architect. In Vitruvius’ ‘The Ten Books On Architecture’ he quickly establishes two fragments that make an architect, the manual skill and the theory and scholarship.