An interdisciplinary approach for tacit knowledge communication between the designer and the computer

Purpose This research investigates the means of tacit knowledge (TK) communication between the designer and the computer in architectural design. Despite the integration of state-of-the-art computational technologies in different design phases, this integration happens within a limited scope, focusing mainly on tangible aspects of the design process, such as technical systems and visual representations. This lets architectural design miss the wider scope technology provides, where it can help in developing the computational design process through incorporating new intangible knowledge domains that were usually neglected, such as tacit knowledge, and through incorporating more design entities that were not included in the design process before. Design/methodology/approach The study conducts an interdisciplinary analytical review of the literature to achieve two main research goals. The first goal investigates TK communication between human beings and the second understands approaches of TK communication between humans and computers. For each goal, three phases were implemented; an initial research phase, where main keywords are identified, a sampling and selection of literature phase and an analysis of literature phase. Findings Through interlinking findings from different disciplines, the study presents a theoretical framework for TK communication. The framework provides architects with an approach to construct and transfer TK while using the computer in a computational design environment, presenting an individual and a social set of conditions and factors revealed from the review of the analyzed literature. The framework particularly emphasizes the significance of a human–computer symbiotic relationship for the process of TK communication to take place. Originality/value This paper presents a novel interdisciplinary reading into the literature of fields beyond architectural design, incorporating intangible knowledge domains into the computational design process and expanding the capabilities of computational design tools to allow for the transfer of intangible design attributes between different design entities, particularly tacit design knowledge.