Dear Parag,

(with apologies for typos, I have to run)

You know how architects research their objects of study. I know too because I am an architect myself. I have worked on projects ranging from urban planning to furniture design and have personal experience with the processes, methods, and attitudes. What you describe is the way architects currently work. There is something valuable in the methodology you describe. I am currently working on such project. Not because I believe that the traditional research methodology of architects is good, but because I think it can be improved immensely.

The text you mention is on the opposite side of my paradigmatic approach to design research. This is not an evaluation. Just a reverential localization of my approach. I work more with soft methodologies, more on the humanistic side. It also studies current thinking. I aim at complete overhaul of this way of thinking, while keeping some of the productive components in it.

It is difficult to argue in defense of programming when a whole list is against it. Regarding your example from interaction design. We have the same situation in architecture, mostly in large, complex, innovative, and unique facilities. You never know how the users will use them, how they will behave in them, and how they will experience them 10 to 20 years along the road. Yet, programming is still better then listening to our everyday intuition, which by the way sometimes is very good, but very often is based on narrow personal experience.

There is a need to explain better to architects why they should ask for a good design program. Then architects need to be taught at school how to read a good program. And after that, there is a moment in every design act (act, a micro component of the process) when there is a programmatic and research component. We should not mix these two situations. There are procedural differences between the large scale and the micro scale situations in design.

It is very hard to write about these issues and provide advice to architects. On the one hand, I do not want to upset my dear colleagues with particular remarks. On the other hand, it is high time that architecture education includes as many courses on social science and programming as they have included for structures, studios, and commuter drafting. They we will have the right balance, then we can talk about real evidence-based design, and then we can be sure that architects will be able to read 500 pages design programs and will also be able to deliver superb programs on their own. I mention all this because it is high time to accept the importance and need for programming and institutionalized research methodologies. I have started arguing about this thirty years ago. My former boss spent his life arguing for this. No success. I still have to argue about the need for research-based programming. I mean research-based and institutionalized programming process. I also argue for the need that architects will only gain if they master social science research for their programmatic moments in the design process.

Only after I studied sociology and made a dissertation, I really understood the difference between the architectural approach to research and the social science approach. I mean the approaches in several social disciplines. If this is explained in some way to architecture students, I think that the resistance will diminish. Only architects described in The Fountainhead will continue insisting on their intuition and everyday spontaneous inquiry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead .

An honest disclosure. My intervention in this thread is inspired by scholarly and economic interests. I would like to make a change and to see a change in the ways architects think. I appreciate and admire good architects. I admire the star architects and actually they are my obsession. However, my business is in sociocultural aspects of design. I want to see large professional communities working in this field, strong bargaining power, a lot of courses in academia. Any attempt to talk that nothing can be programmed hits my business. That is why I take a stand.

By the way, for some time I am contemplating discussion on design programming. I will wait for more appreciative times when I will launch it. I would rather like to hear about best-in-class formalized and institutionalized programming practices around the world. There are such. I know. And there are such people on the list. But the number is very small compared to 2000+ subscribers.

Thank you very much,

Lubomir

-----Original Message-----
From: Parag Deshpande [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2011 9:40 AM
To: [log in to unmask]; Lubomir Savov Popov
Cc: Parag Deshpande
Subject: Re: projection before analysis

Dear Lubomir,

Being a trained architect and having practised architecture for many years I would like to point out that architectural design has its own methods of analysis of a given design setting which are somewhat different than the methods of analysis prevalent in scientific fields.

Architects usually employ two distinct methods, carried out more of less simultaneously, to understand and analyse any given design setting (Heylighen, 2000).

The first method of analysis, akin to the methods of analysis employed in scientific fields, allows architects to collect basic information, in form of drawings (of the given design settings), photographs etc. about the given design setting.

Using the second method of analysis architects develop projections/design solutions (i.e. action) in order to carry out further and deeper analyse the design setting in question. Contrary to the claims made by some of the contributors to this thread re the practise of action before analysis apparently prevalent within traditional design fields, such projections/design solutions are informed by at least a minimal understanding of the given design setting.
Architects use such projections/design solutions as ‘tools’ as critique of such projections/design solutions vis a vis the given design setting allows architects to gain richer insight into the nature of the given design setting.

I would also like to add that while the model of human problem solving, i.e. analysis-synthesis-evaluation works well in some design disciplines it can not be effectively applied to solve problems faced by designers in a number of design disciplines.

For example, within the field of interaction design, it is difficult, if not impossible, to analyse a design setting to design interactive artefact(s) to be used by people within their everyday activity settings. This is because, unlike other more traditional design fields, the potential users of such interactive artefacts know very little, if at all, about their functional, form related and use related aspects. Therefore, in this case, there is little to gain from analysis of the design setting before design, even though the current practise of interaction design suggests otherwise. This, of course, does not mean that analysis of the given design setting is not required but that we need better methods of analysis than currently is the case.

I have made an attempt to discuss architectural method of analysis (although not in great detail) and its application for bringing an interactive artefact into being in my doctoral thesis and I will be happy to share it with you and anyone else if it interests them.


Warm regards,

Parag
…………………………………………………………………..
Heylighen A. (2000) In case of architectural design, KU Leuven, 12-13.