Designing Post-Virtual Architectures

Wicked Tactics and World-Building

Heather Barker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138639973
• eBook ISBN: 9781317266549
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Designing Post-Virtual Architectures: Wicked Tactics and World-Building explores, describes, and demonstrates theories and strategies for design in a post-virtual world. This book reveals affinities among social, mathematical, philosophical, and language expressions integrated into a theoretical framework, facilitating design across physical and virtual space. This experience-driven framework forms the basis for data-driven, experience design methodologies. The implementation of these methodologies takes design work beyond the stylistic expressions of parameters, to data-driven, multi-modal, parametric processes of transformation.

With this book as a resource, architects and designers have a handbook of technical and philosophical concepts to lend rigor to their design work. Numerous diagrams delineate complex ideas while also acting as templates for creating, assessing, and communicating the meaning and value of designed solutions. As a handbook, the intention is to provide a guide to support the application of interdisciplinary tactics across strategic fields. Such novel approaches open up new ways of developing singular solutions and new ways to serve the distributed behaviours systemized through architectures. In an evolving contemporary condition, a foundation of rigorous human-centred design is central to moving the discipline of design into the future.

Providing a range of rigorous methodologies for those looking to develop project-specific strategies, Designing Post-Virtual Architectures: Wicked Tactics and World-Building is a tool to facilitate the creation of innovative and meaningful architectures, and is an ideal resource for postgraduate students of architectural theory, design theory and design methods, as well as academics and professionals practicing the field.

Designing Post-Virtual Architectures:

Wicked Tactics and World-building

Pillar 04 – Deliver/Intersubjective Corroboration

VIGNETTES

THEORIES AND PHILOSOPHIES THAT INFORM DESIGN PRACTICE

Experience Design/Process Constructive Theoretical Framework

Designing Post-Virtual Architectures: Wicked Tactics and World-building

Pillar 04 – Deliver/Intersubjective Corroboration

Theories and Philosophies That Inform Design Practice

THEORY VIGNETTES

INTRODUCTION

This section on theory corresponds to the deliver phase of the design process and the “intersubjective corroboration” of the phenomenological method. It is intended to serve the dialectic, to be public and debated; to provide content for the design salon. Therefore, the philosophical and theoretical questions, statements, and arguments that support the methodologies of practice described previously are presented in a series of loosely contiguous vignettes. These vignettes are not exhaustive arguments but present ideas, set the scene, or provide resources and impressions as the basis for further design discussions – and perhaps act as catalysts for further development in design as a praxis–theoretical discipline.

Phase 01 –Discover/Epoché

Conditions Driving the Theories, Philosophies, and Methodologies That Inform Design Practice

Architectures, bigger than buildings, are contiguous, post-virtual spaces designed for the hybrid condition of human experience through a world-building process. Building the architectures of post-virtual space requires the implementation of interdisciplinary wicked tactics, tools, and processes. This design-tactical action requires agile methodologies that share an abductive logic process, moving phenomenological human experience into an evaluative space of contextual pragmatism. Design as praxis must respond to an evolution in language, theory, methods, and tools tailored to the complex challenges of a new era of experience.

Vignette 1 –Interdisciplinarity, Collective Experience, Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and the Experience Design/Process Constructive (XD/PC) Theoretical Framework

We feel that there is an inner kinship between the attitude on which our philosophical work is founded and the intellectual attitude which presently manifests itself in entirely different walks of life; we feel this orientation in artistic movements, especially in architecture, and in movements which strive for meaningful forms of personal and collective life, of education, and of external organization in general. We feel all around us the same basic orientation, the same style of thinking and doing. It is an orientation which demands clarity everywhere, but which realizes that the fabric of life can never quite be comprehended. It makes us pay careful attention to detail and at the same time recognizes the great lines which run through the whole. It is an orientation which acknowledges the bonds that tie men together, but at the same time strives for free development of the individual. Our work is carried by the faith that this attitude will win the future.¹

Rudolf Carnap, Vienna, May 1928

In practice, design, as a way of thinking, is recognized as applicable across a broad range of disciplines. People are recognizing “the same style of thinking and doing” as a way to create meaning and value. Design has become one of the “great lines which run through the whole”, focusing on the details of the phenomena of human experience and offering up a shared way of solving problems while allowing for individual customization of the processes of design. The design methodologies described, as well as the structure of this work itself, have been developed with reference to the phenomenological method. There have been many explanations of this method, which was first developed by the philosopher, Edmund Husserl; the description that most intuitively aligns with the practice of design is that of Gallagher and Zahavi.² The theoretical principles supporting these methodologies have developed following a “question the question” approach to design practice. That initial phase of discovery is synthesized into a process-theoretical framework and logic model suited to a condition where the “real-world” philosophic foundation of pragmatism holds the methods of phenomenological experience in check. In order to provide the additional nuance necessary to adequately attend to the complexity of design work, this theoretical framework is expanded by principles of cybernetic systems, learning theory, existentialism, and hermeneutics, with its focus on interpretation; the result is the Experience Design/Process Constructive (XD/PC) theoretical framework.

FIGURE 4.1 Experience Design/Process theoretical framework diagram

Design as praxis can benefit from the XD/PC theoretical framework as it establishes the domain of both theoretical and professional discourse. The XD/PC theoretical framework supports a hybrid pragmatism–phenomenology theory. Acknowledging the links to both computer science and morphology, within this text the theory is referred to as pragma–phenome. As a theory, a hybrid of pragmatism and phenomenology aids in understanding the conditions of design while laying the groundwork for building design methodologies for real-world practice. In an era when technologies have changed the material and immaterial behaviors of humans in a metamodern and post-virtual space, the XD/PC acknowledges the

…explosion of technologies for the creation and distribution of images [that] has placed us in a privileged moment of knowledge and relations. Relations to matter and to others, existing and dissolving in the virtuality of places which combine the now-here with the nowhere.³

The pragma–phenome theory supports methodologies that provide relevant, interdisciplinary terminology for contextualization, situated methods for abstraction, values informing reflection on prototypes, and case studies that form the dialectic driving design theory in practice.

As a public- and service-oriented discipline, it is the purpose of design discourse (dialectic) to bring that experience into languages of representation. The intention is to provide a foundation of logic (abductive reasoning) from which practitioners can extend knowledge beyond the observable, generate new ideas, and develop new processes for design innovation, so designers, like sophists, will exhibit that knowledge and the mysteries of their craft convincingly in public practice and exhibition.⁴ Design reclaims the unity of manual and intellectual work, valuing both equally. In times of fascination with new tools and technologies (expressed as a modern glorification of labor, over theory, as important work), and in aspiration for making the future, “…intellectuals, too, should desire to be counted among the working population.”⁵ The XD/PC theoretical framework provides the basis for design to develop further theories and methodologies to create value, as well as to evaluate design in post-virtual society.

Vignette 2 –Design, “Marked”, and “Out”

Design, as a transdisciplinary practice, is a phenomenon of a modern society; one where, “…the new social realm transformed all modern communities into societies of laborers and jobholders.”⁶ In pre-modern societies, design was present within the artisanship of many disciplines. Design existed as a strategy to demonstrate power and to develop the instructions to direct building and action. The evolution from an integrated skillset to a distinct practice continues, beginning with the forces of modernity and continuing through changing relationships amongst humans and their tools. Design is “…an instrument in the service of communication.”⁷

The word design is rooted in designation. To design is to mark, to make a sign. Designing is an active process, making that mark in a way that embodies intention and structure. Design as a verb preceded design as a noun and, as such, even the noun connotes action – and all acts are intentional:

… to act is to modify the shape of the world; it is to arrange in view of an end; it is to produce an organized instrumental complex such that by a series of concatenations and connections the modification effected on one of the links causes modifications throughout the whole series and finally produces an anticipated result.⁸

Design as action is both responsive and predictive. It is driven by the condition of the human psyche in context and, like gestures, “…the psychic life of feelings manifests itself in motions.”⁹ A design embodies both a past and future action; it is the result of a present, active process of inquiry, reflection, creation, and execution. “Thus everything is present: the body, the present perception, and the past as a present impression in the body – all is actuality; the impression does not have a virtual existence qua memory; it is altogether an actual impression.”¹⁰ We act on our impressions in order to convert them to ideas. Those ideas take on form and become mental images; they are eidetic. Such mental images are eidetic because, in memory, they are retained as pictures of some direct contextual experience in a place and time. “This kind of memory is very close to perception, because it arises out of the direct influ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PILLAR 01 – DISCOVER/EPOCH#x00C9;
• PILLAR 02 – DEFINE/PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION
• PILLAR 03 – DEVELOP/EIDETIC VARIATION
• PILLAR 04 – DELIVER/INTERSUBJECTIVE CORROBORATION
• Index