Trend Topics and Changing Concepts of Computational Design in the Last 16 Years A content analysis

This study argues that analysis of written content might be helpful to provide clues at a certain extent on the future directions of current research areas and the emergence of new study areas. In the scope of the study, the International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC) which has been a scientific platform covering many pioneer publications on education research in computer-aided architectural design (CAAD) field was selected as source content. Although the size of the source domain is limited, the analysis of abstracts and titles of 439 articles published in IJAC between 2003 and 2018 revealed promising results which can be examined under four characteristics: ``constant'', ``emerging'', ``fading'' and ``solidifying'' concepts. The tokens in the analysis process are words, phrases, topic nodes and links between topic nodes. The outcomes of this study might contribute to tracking the evolution of concepts their emergence or disusage in different time and contexts, and interrelations between different concepts.