| authors |
Thiel, Philip |
| year |
1993 |
| title |
A Better Understanding of The Role of Endoscopy as a Tool in Architecture |
| source |
Endoscopy as a Tool in Architecture [Proceedings of the 1st European Architectural Endoscopy Association Conference / ISBN 951-722-069-3] Tampere (Finland), 25-28 August 1993, pp. 123-128 |
| summary |
As the most tool-dependent species on our planet, our technology determines our activities and thus defines our existence. Because of this a clear understanding of the ends-means relationship of our tools is of critical social- and professional-concern. Endoscopy, or the use of periscopic-like devices to extract human eye-level visual images, static or dynamic, from iconic scale models of proposed environments, is a case in point. Use is appropriate at advanced stages of planning and design, when such experiential simulations are necessary for both professional evaluation and lay approval. But note that the simulation is only a means to an end, and that the fundamental purpose is to evoke a response to a proposal. Simulation and response are opposite sides of the same coin, and the response is the goal. Any such responses are meaningful only with reference to the ultimate users’ experiential preferences, preferably explicitly established as ”performance specifications” before the start of the design process in consultation with a representative sample of these people. This implies the necessity of a means to identify these beneficiaries of our work, and a means to characterize their environmental ”experiential profiles”. It also requires a means for the discursive scripting of their experiential preferences. The development of a design oriented to the achievement of these ends then depends on a similar time-based scoring for the description of sequentially-experienced environmental attributes, hypothesized as related to these responses. Endoscopy then takes its place as the means for a penultimate check on the experiential design-hypotheses, in conjunction with suitable means to record the simulates’ responses in the same format as the original experiential performance specifications, for comparison therewith. The danger in being the most tool-dependent species on Earth is that in our necessary concern with technological means we may loose sight of our ultimate human ends; as suggested by the apothegm ”the operation was a success, but the patient died”. Our inexorable impetus toward technological development means that the specialized training that is inherent in professional education tends to separate and distance the perceptions of those so conditioned from those of the many others who are the presumed beneficiaries of their efforts. |
| keywords |
Architectural Endoscopy |
| series |
EAEA |
| more |
http://info.tuwien.ac.at/eaea/ |
| full text |
 file.pdf (21,975 bytes) |
| references |
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| last changed |
2005/09/09 10:43 |
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