International Journal of

  In this paper, authors tackle three very important questions that need to be answered if a theory of design is to be constructed. The first is what designers do, Which we attempt to illustrate with the help of case studies and theories of design practice. The second question is what guides designers. Here, authors try to present some of the proposed normative positions about design, to show the similarities and differences between positions and a framework of how they can be categorized. The main (third) question is how the design thinking process can be represented drawing upon on a review of recent studies of design practice and designer's creativity.

  One approach to design thinking is to extract the features of the designers' strategic knowledge, for which comparative studies between expert designers and novices are useful. Also, controlled experimental studies may be adopted in order to understand the nature of the idea generation process.

To date, researchers from various disciplines have studies leisure time; most have focused on quality of leisure activity, psychological benefits of leisure, spiritual effect, thereby neglecting the effect of social classes on features and quality of the selected place. Third place is defined as a location outside of home or work that allows for social interaction and emotional support, regardless of levels and social classes, ethnic and racial differences. While it seems that the presence of such places in our society has a significant relationship with social classes; in the sense that different levels of social classes are more apt to form distinct number and types of third places. The current research tries to investigate the relationship between different social setting and people identification of third place, for spending leisure time. People attach identifications or meanings to these third places based on the type of needs met for the individual by these places.

Because of the differences between indoor and outdoor thermal condition, preparing some outdoor thermal indices is a way to understand and categorize the outdoor thermal sensation. The aim of these indices is not to provide thermal comfort - as it is the aim of indoor indices. Instead, they are provided to analyze outdoor thermal sensation to help architects, landscape architects and urban designers in design procedure to provide the most possible tolerable thermal condition in outdoor places such as urban public spaces. This article is the result of some field studies have been done in 2010 - 2012 in five different climates: hot semi humid (Ahvaz, Iran), tropical (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), hot-arid (Kashan, Iran), moderate-arid (Tehran, Iran) and cold (Sheffield, UK) in their worst thermal period. The main question in this research is: which outdoor thermal index is appropriate for a specific climate? And how much it is accurate to evaluate outdoor thermal sensation especially in different levels of cold stress and heat stress condition? In each field study the weather data including temperature, humidity and wind speed, are collected by two portable Kestrel weather stations to show weather condition in local and microclimate levels. People's behavior in outdoor spaces is observed to understand their reaction to the different thermal conditions. A nominal observation scale is used for people’s age, health, clothes, activity and exposure time. Outdoor thermal indices that are used in this research are: Humidex, WBGT (wet bulb globe temperature), TSI (tropical summer index), Summer Outdoor Comfort Zone, WCET (wind chill equivalent temperature), THI (temperature humidity index) and UTCI (universal thermal climate index). The results show that outdoor thermal indices may have not the same explanation for the same thermal condition. Some of them are more appropriate for some specific condition while others are not. At last it would be summarized that they have acceptable sensitivity to temperature but most of them need to become more sensitive to humidity and air velocity.