IABSE Conference Bath 2017 (ePDF)

“Creativity and Collaboration: instilling imagination and innovation in structural design”. By adopting a theme centred on conceptual design, innovation and collaboration, the majority of the papers address aspects relating to the processes and inspirations of conceptual design and, compared to previous conferences, there are fewer dealing with design outputs and the details of the designed structures themselves. The Scientific Committee has tried to avoid having too many papers on theoretical and numerical aspects, technical details and structural analysis (although some have inevitably been included), and have concentrated instead on those addressing the more philosophical and conceptual ideas that spark our imaginations and allow us to come up with good structural design solutions in the first place. We have also been interested to explore how best to work together in collaborative multi‐disciplinary design teams, to consider how to teach and encourage conceptual design most effectively, to identify the barriers to good design, and to better understand the rapidly changing digital world in which we now conduct all our work. Given that the conference would be in the historical city of Bath we also felt it important to include a topic related to the way we deal with historic and heritage structures. Accordingly, we invited, and received, proposals for papers, presentations and sessions under seven broad topic headings: 1. Creative conceptual design 2. Digital workflow and computational design tools 3. Collaboration and integration in the conceptual design process 4. Educating, inspiring and developing creative and innovative designers 5. The influence of social, historical and cultural values in conceptual design 6. Balancing innovation and risk – making sound judgements in the design process 7. Innovative design methods for strengthening of existing and heritage structures