‘Chaos, Trends and/or Rhythms Constituting Structures in Time’ by Franz Halberg (2001)

While recent studies by Stanford’s Martin Fischer highlight the benefits of employing 4D modeling in construction (improved communications for planning and production) the most common reasons for lack of adoption into practice is the steep learning curve, lack of analytical support and cost. Despite Fischer’s methodology ‘generating 4D models from 3d product models’ I would argue that valuable criteria remains missing from the project.

Currently, all 4D design systems are 3D platforms with procurement and scheduling plug-ins – essentially post-conceptual, thus limiting collaborative influence in the early stages of design. Without the ability to conceptualize ‘time’ as a critical dimension beyond the other 3, all environment design is fatally flawed from the earliest point of creative ideation. This is not however the fault of the architect – digital modeling platforms enforce a ‘bounded projection’ in how designers think and structure projects from a user-centred perspective. 4D models may be more easily understood by stakeholders, yet such benefits mask an critical point – buildings do not function solely as commodified entities, they must also adapt to provide stimulating and healthy environments over time to a broad range of people.

The physiological effects of ’time’ on humans has been known since the C18, with the latest studies linking chronobiological cycles to the human genome (Duboule, 2003). With the arrival of chronomic science (see Halberg‘s diagram above) and growth in evidence supporting the effects of electronic media on neurotransmitters like serotonin, noradrenaline, dopamine and tryptophan (natural psychotropics) an increasing number of researchers are now looking beyond traditional cognitive models to question the chronomic implications of media. My thesis begins with the assumption that chronomic science has the potential to counter traditional ‘closed’ systems of architectural design based on cybernetic homeostasis (the ‘superorganism’) by providing more ‘open’ tangible media frameworks instructed by biological rhythmicity.

Fabien Girardin‘s Sketching with Data for the Louvre Museum using visual programming environment Impure by Bestiario

Debates on the effects of drawing technologies have been in circulation since the emergence of design education in the mid C19, specifically Dyce’s objections to the pervasive bias of life drawing (Bell, 1963). Despite a fleeting renaissance in drawing, visualization researcher Pam Schenk notes that promoting the benefits of drawing to students has become increasingly problematic. In a recent letter to Tracey, Schenk confirms that due to increased applications of digital media over the past two decades, design graduates lack critical drawing skills. Schenk’s studies into the habits of print, textile and industrial designers over a 20 year period concluded that drawing ‘remains at the centre of the creative and developmental process of design’ for two key reasons; a) to support conceptualization and b) to facilitate communication.¹

Optimizing conceptual and communicative media is clearly important, and drawing skills have remained fundamental in developing some of the latest collaborative visualization tools – e.g. Dorta’s Hybrid Ideation Space, however the emerging fields of environmental informatics and visual programming (above) suggest that as creative design processes become more mediated, intelligent and complex, it may be only a matter of time before traditional modes of sketching become virtually redundant, as Bill Mitchell suggested more than two decades ago.² Citing Mark Burry‘s 1997 paper ‘Narrowing the Gap Between CAAD and Computer Programming’ Boeykens and Neukermanns recognize the need to assign visual programming equal weight within the architectural curriculum:

‘…the relation between programming and design studio assignments is still non-existent in many schools, nowadays… Programming should be part of the main architectural skills, albeit not necessarily in the sense of writing code…’³

Arguments for architects to adopt visual programming (e.g. via Bentley’s Generative Components and Rhino’s Grasshopper3D) are not new. Algorithmic Architecture by Kostas Terzidis (2006) similarly praised the benefits of the computational interface. However, as Flusser reminds us in The Shape of Things: a philosophy of design (Reaktion Books, 1999) a reciprocal dependency remains: ‘the robot only does what the human being wants, but the human being can only want what the robot can do’ (p.48). While I would agree that architectural graduates desperately require a minimum of computational knowledge, the visual programming bias of systems like the ones mentioned above still reduce architects to ‘functionaries’ of their own tools. The nature of the GUI is what needs to be challenged, not the design process itself. This is the fundamental mistake design theorists routinely make when adopting computer metaphor as cognitive model (Dorst, 2007).

1. Schenk, P. (2007) A Letter from the Front Line. Published in Tracey: What is Drawing For?

2. Mitchell, W. J. (1989) The Death of Drawing. UCLA Architecture Journal 2: 64-69

3. Boeykens, S. & Neuckermans, H. (2009) Visual Programming in Architecture: Should Architects be trained as programmers? CAAD Futures 2009 Conference Proceedings

In 2005, neuroscientist Alice Flaherty presented an interesting three-factor anatomical model for creative drive and ideation based on communication between the temporal lobes, frontal lobes and limbic system. Supporting earlier studies which showed minimal relations between creativity and intelligence (Torrance, 1974), Flaherty’s chart (above) aims to rotate the traditional hemispheric models of creativity by 90°, arguing that connections between the frontal lobes and temporal lobes are more important than those between the left and right hemispheres.’¹ Contrary to most neuroscientific studies of language which focus on skill acquisition, Flaherty highlights the importance of the limbic system in genertating ideas, drawing her conclusions from a much broader range of subjects, not only surgically treated epileptics.

I accept that ‘not all aspects of this model have yet been tested’, however Flaherty’s 3-factor model may not extend far beyond the hemispherical model she aims to counter. I would argue that many similar reductionist approaches emerge from the wrong world-view. The creative process can not simply be reduced to an (internal) limbic urge to express oneself, like the hypergraphia she experienced in response to the death of her own premature twins.² The intensly mediated nature of C21 life directly challenges the notion of thought as skin or skull-bound (Clark, 1995), indeed current research into digital networks aim to show how cognition extends across a range of media (O’Hara, 2006). Therefore monitoring how media inhibit chaotic disequilibrium³ in the human brain may be equally critical in further understanding creative block and its related effects.

1. Alice Flaherty, Frontotemporal and dopaminergic control of ideal generation and creative drive, J Comp Neurol. 2005 December 5; 493(1): 147–153

2. Alice Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, (Clarion, 2004)

3. David Bohm & David Peat, Science, Order, and Creativity. (Bantam 1987)

In Laws of Media (1988) McLuhan cites Jacques Lusseyran‘s violent childhood loss of sight to support his own communication theory:

Blindness works like a dope, a fact that we have to reckon with. I don’t believe there is a blind man alive who has not felt the danger of intoxication. Like drugs, blindness heightens certain sensations, giving sudden and often disturbing sharpness to the senses of hearing and touch. But most of all, like a drug, it develops inner as against outer experience, and sometimes to excess.¹

Inspired by Lusseyran’s depiction of sensory blindness, McLuhan forms his own Media Tetrad by extending the Sciences of Francis Bacon and Gambattista Vico, asserting that ‘Bacon’s four idols constitute the basis for a complete theory of communication in that they account for the various forms of blindness and ignorance conferred upon self and society by technology and culture alike.² Bacon summarizes four cognitive biases (idols) as…

Idols of the Tribe (idola tribus) a bias rooted in ‘the tribe or race of men… a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of all things… the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it’. Idols of the Cave (idola specus) a bias of the individual man ‘which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others’. Idols of the Marketplace (idola fori) a bias ‘formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other… words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies’. Idols of the Theatre (idola theatri) a bias which has ‘immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies… all the received systems are but stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal scenic fashion’.³

While Vico’s New Science emerged almost century after Bacon’s Novum Organum, despite the pervading influence of Guttenberg’s Galaxy both managed to arrive at similar conclusions – i.e. that the human mind works in a highly poetic and creative way, constructing both itself and its environment via non-rational (non-Cartesian) principles.

1. Jacques Lusseyran (1963) And There Was Light. Trans by Elizabeth R. Cameron. Little, Brown & Company, p.49

2. Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan (1988) Laws of Media: The New Science. Univeristy of Toronto Press, p.83

3. Francis Bacon (1620) Novum Organum. Retrieved online 04/02/2011 from  http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Novum_Organum

In his 2002 PhD thesis, Rabah Bousbaci outlined the main theoretical models of architecture and design disciplines, exploring the potential for moral and ethical reasoning to provide a philosophical basis for architecture. In a more recent paper The Models of Man in Design Thinking Bousabaci cites Nigel Cross, stating that design thinking has been described ‘in terms of what is largely accepted today as the “generation game” (i.e., first-,second-, and third-generation design methods’ (above). Reacting against the intuitive processes of the “beaux-arts”, between the late 1950s and 1967, supporters of the first generation championed highly rationalistic design. Between 1967 and 1983 a second generation informed by the participatory theses of Horst Rittel and Christopher Alexander reduced design to processes of bounded rationality. Finally since 1983, based on the cognitive analyses of Donald Schon, a third generation operate from within the “reflective turn“. As Bousabaci’s review shows, since the early 1980s research in design thinking has attempted to incorporate a broader range of issues (poetical, rhetorical, phenomenological, hermeneutical, and ethical). However some researchers in the field would be reluctant to define this final shift as paradigmatic.

In Design Research: a revolution waiting to happen, design thinking guru Kees Dorst claims outcomes of modeling design research have been problematic for two reasons: 1) an overwhelming ‘emphasis on the process of design’ and 2) a ‘strong orientation towards practice’. For Dorst, such conditions have resulted in cognitive divisions between observing, describing, explaining and prescribing design tools for education and practice. Perhaps more importantly, Dorst recognizes a fundamental lack of explanatory framework on which to develop an academic knowledge base, rendering the majority of design research virtually impenetrable to critical analysis. Inspired by contemporary educational preference for Hubert Dreyfus‘ learning model (learning-by-doing), Dorst and collaborator Brian Lawson have recently attempted to counter the above scenario with a systematized model of ‘design expertise’. Initial findings suggest design can be reduced to a seven-layered process, beginning with the ’naive’, ‘novice’ and ‘advanced beginner’, and extending to the ‘competent’, ‘expert’, ‘master’ and ‘visionary’.

Kees accepts ‘there may be discontinuities in the model’ due to Dreyfus’ methodological mix of AI critique and phenomenological theory, yet clearly any attempt to provide ‘an empirical basis for levels of design expertise’ using Dreyfus’ anecdotally-biased model would seem constrained by the very processes they wish to counter. Whether responding to the limitations of protocol analysis or inspired by emerging applications of neuromarketing, John McCardle’s inquiry into identity and affect in design cognition may provide a genuine break from tradition. McCardle’s musings in ‘further investigations’ suggest the interplay or resonant interval between ‘the effects of design activity on the designer’ and ‘the role of self-concept in design cognition’ can be expanded via a series of skin conductance experiments. Based on physiological response and models of the extended mind, such approaches may indeed prove to be paradigmatic…