id |
ddss9476 |
authors |
Porada, Mikhael and Porada, Sabine |
year |
1994 |
title |
"To See Ideas" or The Visualizing of Programmatic Data Reading Examples in Architecture and Town Planning |
source |
Second Design and Decision Support Systems in Architecture & Urban Planning (Vaals, the Netherlands), August 15-19, 1994 |
summary |
Whether images are still in the mind, metaphors, sketches or icons, they play a crucial role. They have always been the heuristic pivot around which the process of artefact design organizes itself, particularly in architecture and town-planning. "To see ideas" through computer ideograms is to experiment an interesting and new direction for "pictural approach" supported design. Cognitive psychology emphasizes the important part played by mental images in reasoning, imagination in the working of human intelligence and the construction of mental images as cognitive factors underlying reasoning. It also points out how close computerized objects and mental schemata are. "To reason over a situation is first to remember or build some mental models of this situation; second to make those models work or simulate them in order to observe what would happen in different circumstances and then verify whether they fit the experiment data; third to select the best model, a tool meant to sustain and amplify the elaboration of mental models, which is a spontaneous activity". We introduce our exploration of the direct transmission of mental models through computer ideograms. We study the "operative" and the "expressive" aspects, and this allows us to analyze how some aspects in a field of knowledge are represented by ideograms, schemata, icons, etc. Aid to imagination, reasoning and communication by means of a graphic language must be limited to some figurative relevant aspects of the domain considered; it should not aim at a realistic simulation. Therefore, the important role played by icons and the spatial schematic representation of knowledge is emphasized. Our hypothesis is that an architectural concept does not result from an inductive process, but rather is built to solve problems through the direct representation of ideas with ideograms. An experiment was conducted with a graphic language, a dynamic scenography and actor-objects. The language allows one to build and visualize models from the various domains of knowledge of the object. The dynamic scenography can explore and simulate kinetically those models by means of staging various narrations and visual scenarios. The actor-objects play various and complementary parts in order to make the image explicit and link it with the concept. We distinguish between two parallel levels of reality in computer ideographics: one concerns the model, it represents the visualization of a graphic model at a particular moment and according to a particular representation, the other concerns the ideogram. |
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last changed |
2003/08/07 16:36 |
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