ABSTRACT
This chapter is a result of 7-year-long experience in teaching architectural design studio, with 60 students in each year, at Azad University of Mashhad, Iran. The ‘Desearch Puzzle’ model (Design + Research = Desearch) was a tool to merge research and design in a design process and set a problem-oriented approach. The game aims to teach students what the relationship between research and design is and how they can solve multi-dimensional and interrelated problems. The ‘Desearch’ game helps students increase their creativity through graphical representation, such as sketches, diagrams, and models as a means of visual thinking exercises. Sketches and diagrams, which present students’ responses to these factors, fill the white fields of the crossword puzzle. They are highly interactive, interrelated, and complementary. This approach enables students to think about different aspects of design as a puzzle-making activity, as well as to discover the relations between different parts and dimensions of a design problem in order to achieve a unique and integrated solution. The successfully completed puzzles belong to students who consider design as a kind of research activity. They complete the puzzle by giving priority to find and set problems in sequence and identifying relations between them. Students learned to start a design by asking ‘How’ and ‘Why’ questions for finding connections between problems, thereby discovering how the research could be complementary to the practicality of design processes.
