Value-Focused Thinking versus Alternative-Focus Thinking approach. How to support design process by values

The design of quality alternatives is still considered as a crucial is- sue in many decision-making contexts. When the problem consists of creating different options for sustainable urban development, the decision is even more critical since there are several needs, values and objectives to be investigated in order to identify the most satisfactory alternative from among those available. Addressing decisions to the good enough solution rather than to the optimal one depends on many reasons, such as: the difficulty to access and process the information needed to take a good decision; the instance of achieving a balance among different dimensions of urban development, namely the economic, environmental and social ones; the not always consensual preferences of the stakeholders involved in these kind of processes. Start- ing from these premises, what deserves to be explored and represents a major challenge in the context of design is the modeling phase, when objectives are identified and alternative strategies and actions are de- fined. In order to provide a contribution to the empirical line of re- search on alternative generation, the paper compares within a design process the Value-Focused Thinking approach, based on values’ elicitation, in contrast to the Alternative-Focused Thinking (AFT), based on the generation of alternatives. The results point out the relevance of a Hybrid Practical Value Model consistent to a cyclical notion of the evaluation instead of a linear one.