Setting Out. Creative Strategies for the Beginning Phase in Large-Scale Landscape Design

The chapter provides both a reflection on the PhD’s actual design research process as well as an overview of its results. The ‘foundations and principles for creative design beginnings for large-scale urban landscapes’ offer instructions on how to set up the initial design phase in large-scale urban landscape projects and how engagement with our senses, intuition and empathy – in a phenomenological and hermeneutic sense – can help boost our creativity and generate design ideas, as we are perfectly well equipped in our brains and hearts to understand complex situations such as urban landscapes ‘as a whole’, if only we can tap into our intuition and empathy. Furthermore, the chapter shows how the different exercises in one’s own design studios can become case studies for research. The PhD represents a research design process linking research through design with research about and for design.