| authors |
Wade, John W. and Baur, J. Scott |
| year |
1989 |
| title |
Evaluation According to a Metric for Visual Order |
| source |
December 1989. 18 p. includes bibliography |
| summary |
Varying degrees of stimulus in the environment are appropriate to different tasks, so a uniform level of order in design cannot account for the many activities that will take place in a building. An ability to measure the visual order in a scene would facilitate the evaluation of design proposals. The designer could apply such a measure to establish a preferred level of order for a particular activity. A measure of order would also make possible the evaluation of the finished building product in terms of its use and in terms of any explicit goals of the designer. This paper describes a group of hypotheses proposed by Wade in a 1976 paper intended to develop a metric for visual order. It then examines the available literature to include other research that relates to this topic. It brings the earlier hypotheses up to date, outlines a strategy for testing those hypotheses, and proposes to develop the metric using computer image processing techniques. It also describes the methods that will be applied to validate the metric against the order that people perceive in the environment. To establish an objective standard for order, the metric that assesses the order will address only the features and attributes specific to scene. Thus, the measure will depend on neither the semantic content nor the figural properties of the field. The hypotheses under investigation are: (1) That visual order is related to the number of potential figure-ground shifts present in a visual field; (2) that the number of figure- ground shifts is dependent on the degree of articulation of the field; (3) that the number of figure-ground shifts is dependent on the distribution of color in the visual field; and (4) that the number of figure-ground shifts is dependent on the structure of the visual field. The various components of these elements are also detailed. From this, the designer will be able to determine which components of a design possess the appropriate level of order for a given task and which do not. The direct application of these principles will be explored in the design studio |
| keywords |
evaluation, analysis, aesthetics, form |
| series |
CADline |
| references |
Content-type: text/plain
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| last changed |
2003/06/02 13:58 |
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