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Examine the design processes
Having decided what kinds of activities I want to examine, here I must choose representative designers in architecture, and look for specific design activities of the type defined in part one.
Ideally, I would have an exemplary designer that everyone would propose as a subject, and whose thoughts and activities are completely documented and available. Lacking such a designer, I hope to study several ‘famous’ designers through the literature. Current candidates are:
- Santiago Calatrava
- Herman Hertzberger
- Richard MacCormack
- John Outram
- Ian Ritchie
- Robert Venturi
I will also be studying one or more ‘ordinary’ designers, and the literature of design methods, in order to get some idea of the preoccupations of designers and methodologists, and the relations between theory and practice. A local architect has agreed to allow me to document a small project of his. I will also follow up the Sheffield studies.
Model the design processes
This part of the project seems, at the moment, to pose the greatest problems, although solutions or attempts at solutions to some of the problems were examined at the VRI98 conference.
Since the idea is to use Clarity to validate the model of design, it seems a good thing to know what the status of a model is. Some of the papers at VRI98 were very useful in that they discussed exactly this. What is a model? How does it relate to theory? What can we expect from a model? What is the process and advantage of translation across modes or domains? Again, how do we define or bound our proposed domains? From these discussions I have some idea at least about how to begin examining the issues.
For example, how do we know when two activities within the design process are the same? One way is to try to transform one into the other using a set of semantic or other rules. I could possibly use this a starting point for including sketching and other visio-spatial activities in the Clarity model.
Such a transformation must happen at a consistent level of abstraction. The question then arises, at what levels of abstraction are there sufficient shared activities between designers that are significantly different from other activities, to make them design activities? This kind of approach may help in part one of the thesis. Another question that springs to mind is: Can we tie down in some way this extremely vague idea of ‘a level of abstraction’? Rom Harre’s type hierarchy (also discussed at VRI98) may be relevant or useful here.
Some possible alternative representations to Clarity were described at VRI98 (Petri nets, why-because graphs, concept maps, genetic models), which could be useful either as an intermediate step in moving from real-world process to Clarity model, or as a component within the Clarity model itself.
Since Clarity is a visual programming technique, the papers at VRI98 on visual recognition, and on the importance of visual literacy, were also useful. The thesis will include a critique of the ‘visualness’ of Clarity, as well as outline its claims for model validation.
Nancy de Freitas made an interesting point when she said ‘designers actively avoid exact definition’. This is an interesting because, while Clarity allows inexactness in definition, it is not clear how useful validating a model containing inexact components would be. Again, Rom Harre’s type hierarchy may provide some clue about how it may be possible.
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