Form Follows Feeling – The Acquisition of Design Expertise and the Function of Aesthesis in the Design Process

While the consideration of functional and technical criteria, as well as a sense of coherence are basic requirements for solving a design problem; it is the ability to induce an intended quality of aesthetic experience that is the hallmark of design expertise. Expert designers possess a highly developed sense of design, or what in this research is called aesthesis. Reflection on 25 years teaching design in the USA, Hungary, and China led to the observation that most successful design students, more than intellectual ability, drawing, model making or drive, all seemed to possess what may be called an intuitive sense of good design. It is not that they already know how to design, or that they are natural designers, it is that they have a more developed sense aesthesis. This research takes a multi-disciplinary approach to build a theory that describes what is involved in acquiring design expertise,identifies how aesthesis functions in the design process, and determines if what appears to be an intuitive sense of design is just natural talent or an acquired ability.While the consideration of functional and technical criteria, as well as a sense of coherence are basic requirements for solving a design problem; it is the ability to induce an intended quality of aesthetic experience that is the hallmark of design expertise. Expert designers possess a highly developed sense of design, or what in this research is called aesthesis. Reflection on 25 years teaching design in the USA, Hungary, and China led to the observation that most successful design students, more than intellectual ability, drawing, model making or drive, all seemed to possess what may be called an intuitive sense of good design. It is not that they already know how to design, or that they are natural designers, it is that they have a more developed sense aesthesis. This research takes a multi-disciplinary approach to build a theory that describes what is involved in acquiring design expertise,identifies how aesthesis functions in the design process, and determines if what appears to be an intuitive sense of design is just natural talent or an acquired ability.The research started with topics related to design methodology, which led to questions related to cognitive psychology, especially theories of problem-solving. An in-depth review of research in embodied cognition challenged the disembodied concept of the mind and related presuppositions, and reintroduced the body as an essential aspect of human cognition. This lead to related topics including: pre-noetic (pre-verbal) knowledge, the cognitive architecture of the brain, sense mechanisms and perception, limitations and types of memory as well as the processing capacity of the brain, and especially how emotions/feelings function in human cognition, offering insight into how designing functions as a cognitive process. The research provides evidence that more than technical rationality, expert designers rely heavily on a highly developed embodied way of knowing (tacit knowledge) througout the design process that allows them to know more than they can say. Indeed, this is the hallmark of expert performers in many fields. However, this ability is not to be understood as natural talent, but as a result of an intense developmental process that includes years of deliberate practice necessary to restructure the brain and adapt the body in a manner that facilitates exceptional performance. For expert designers it is aesthesis (a kind of body knowledge), functioning as a meta-heuristic, that allows them to solve a complex problem situation in a manner that appears effortless. Aesthesis is an ability that everyone possesses, but that expert designers have highly developed and adapted to allow them to produce buildings and built environments that induce an intended quality of aesthetic experience in the user. It is a cognitive ability that functions to both (re)structure the design problem and evaluate the solution; and allows the designer to inhabit the design world feelingly while seeking aesthetic resonance that anticipates the quality of atmosphere another is likely to experience. This ability is critical to the acquisition of design expertise

Form Follows Feeling – The Acquisition of Design Expertise and the Function of Aesthesis in the Design Process

While the consideration of functional and technical criteria, as well as a sense of coherence, are basic requirements for solving a design problem; it is the ability to induce an intended quality of aesthetic experience that is the hallmark of design expertise. Expert designers possess a highly developed sense of design, or what in this research is called aesthesis. Reflection on 25 years teaching design in the USA, Hungary, and China led to the observation that most successful design students, more than intellectual ability, drawing, model making or drive, all seemed to possess what may be called an intuitive sense of good design. It is not that they already know how to design, or that they are natural designers, it is that they have a more developed sense aesthesis. This research takes a multi-disciplinary approach to build a theory that describes what is involved in acquiring design expertise, identifies how aesthesis functions in the design process and determines if what appears to be an intuitive sense of design is just natural talent or an acquired ability. The research started with topics related to design methodology, which led to questions related to cognitive psychology, especially theories of problem-solving. An in-depth review of research in embodied cognition challenged the disembodied concept of the mind and related presuppositions and reintroduced the body as an essential aspect of human cognition. This lead to related topics including: pre-noetic (pre-verbal) knowledge, the cognitive architecture of the brain, sense mechanisms and perception, limitations and types of memory as well as the processing capacity of the brain, and especially how emotions/feelings function in human cognition, offering insight into how designing functions as a cognitive process.  The research provides evidence that more than technical rationality, expert designers rely heavily on a highly developed embodied way of knowing (tacit knowledge) throughout the design process that allows them to know more than they can say. Indeed, this is the hallmark of expert performers in many fields. However, this ability is not to be understood as natural talent, but as a result of an intense developmental process that includes years of deliberate practice necessary to restructure the brain and adapt the body in a manner that facilitates exceptional performance. For expert designers it is aesthesis (a kind of body knowledge), functioning as a meta-heuristic, that allows them to solve a complex problem situation in a manner that appears effortless. Aesthesis is an ability that everyone possesses that expert designers have highly developed and adapted to allow them to produce buildings and built environments that induce an intended quality of aesthetic experience to the user. It is a cognitive ability that functions to both (re)structure the design problem, evaluates the solution and allows the designer to inhabit the design world feelingly while seeking aesthetic resonance that anticipates the quality of atmosphere another is likely to experience. This ability is critical to the acquisition of design expertise

Using features for automated problem solving

We motivate and present an architecture for problem solving where an abstraction layer of "features" plays the key role in determining methods to apply. The system is presented in the context of theorem proving with Isabelle, and we demonstrate how this approach to encoding control knowledge is expressively different to other common techniques. We look closely at two areas where the feature layer may offer benefits to theorem proving — semi-automation and learning — and find strong evidence that in these particular domains, the approach shows compelling promise. The system includes a graphical theorem-proving user interface for Eclipse ProofGeneral and is available from the project web page, http://feasch.heneveld.org

UGURU: a natural language UNIX consultant

UGURU is a natural language conversation program, implemented in Prolog, which can manage a wide knowledge base of facts about Unix. The range and wording of questions that it understands are based on surveys taken of students, mostly Unix beginners. UGURU is also designed to accept statements in English that can be added as facts to the knowledge base. Each fact is represented as a binding set: a verb-oriented semantic net with the characteristics of directed acyclic graphs. The main actions taken by UGURU are divided between two primary modules, a parser and a retriever. To produce a binding set from an input, the parser incorporates a new kind of object-oriented grammar of several levels, parallel tracing of distinct parse trees by independent units called recognizers, the concurrent use of both syntactic and semantic knowledge, and a pragmatic criterion that requires the system to mimic the sequence of human parsing. The retriever, invoked to answer input questions, seeks to match the binding set representing the question to a fact in the knowledge base by performing semantic transformations on the two sets

In the Beginning was the Word: Concepts, Perception, and Human Being

In this thesis, I argue that humans are differentiated from other animals through a faculty of linguistically-structured perception through which we directly perceive things in virtue of their higher-order, conceptually-articulated properties. Yet I also argue that we retain a non-conceptual form of awareness that we share with non-human animals. Through an investigation of the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell, I explore a phenomenology of expertise in order to defend a Dreyfusian view that argues that the experiential content of our practical dealings must undergo a translation if it is to become the content of conceptual capacities. However, although I agree with Dreyfus that our untranslated experience is of a kind that is shared with other animals, I also argue that he plays down the interdependence of conceptual and non-conceptual content in humans. I articulate this interdependence through a discussion of phronesis, 'practical wisdom,' as it is used in the debate, as well as by Heidegger. Drawing on McDowell's assertion that our conceptual capacities develop with our acquisition of a language and our initiation into a second-nature 'world,' I argue that our practical coping is better described not as non-conceptual but as post-conceptual; that is to say, human coping involves navigating our second-nature 'worlds' in the same, direct way that animals navigate their first nature environments. In the second part, I argue that this 'world' is ultimately linguistic in the sense that our conceptual experience is drawn from a grammatically-structured perception that Heidegger called vernehmen, 'apprehension,' which he identified with noesis. This structure creates the object-subject relationship through which we directly perceive entities as being objects. Through noesis, we experience concepts as things, and our capacity to cope post-conceptually with language and ideas powers the exponential creativity of human thought and action in our rich, second-nature ‘worlds.’ However, the cultural contingency of many concepts indicates a potential discordance between concepts and their experiential source. I conclude that while such discordances are not incommensurable, and that knowledge of reality is not inaccessible to us, we must be careful about the faith we put in language to describe it, for as soon as we conceptualise, we enter a sphere as much created as perceived

Language: what it's for and why we have it

In this thesis, I agree with the notion that human natural languages are underpinned by an innate faculty of language which predisposes us to acquire the structural aspects of language. Theories pertaining to its primary function, however, are lacking as they are either out of touch with the bigger picture of human social life (Berwick and Chomsky 2017) or, if they do embrace this, they are met with challenges from evolutionary and communication theory (Pinker and Bloom 1990; Jackendoff 2002). In order to give a more satisfactory evolutionary account of the faculty of language, I propose that we take inspiration from the alternative view that natural languages are social entities which are wholly learnt and exist to improve human cooperation and social living (Tomasello 2014; Sterelny 2012). An important aspect of this view is seeing that humans have an advanced form of social cognition—that is the ability to understand that other creatures also have minds—which underpins their cooperative and communicative capabilities. I suggest, instead, that we ask what the faculty of language brings to this viewpoint. My response is that an innate linguistic structure is able to bring to mind new thoughts, ideas, or explanations in human communicative discourse and in situations where it would not be possible with just standalone words or pointing and pantomime. In more technical terms ‘the primary function of the faculty of language is to make relevant what is not salient in communicative discourses’. The faculty of language, thus, introduces a new paradigm to human communication and social living. In conclusion, we will appreciate that an approach which integrates valuable lessons from viewpoints that are usually diametrically opposed provides a picture of language evolution that is more holistic and streamlined. My theory, therefore, appreciates and combines our understanding of linguistic structure, social cognition, human communication, and evolution in a way that is not seen in either of the theories that precede it

Holistically Evaluating Agent Based Social System Models

The philosophical perspectives on model evaluation can be broadly classified into reductionist/logical positivist and relativist/holistic. In this paper, we outline some of our past efforts in, and challenges faced during, evaluating models of social systems with cognitively detailed agents. Owing to richness in the model, we argue that the holistic approach and consequent continuous improvement are essential to evaluating complex social system models such as these. A social system built primarily of cognitively detailed agents can provide multiple levels of correspondence, both at observable and abstract aggregated levels. Such a system can also pose several challenges, including large feature spaces, issues in information elicitation with database, experts and news feeds, counterfactuals, fragmented theoretical base, and limited funding for validation. We subscribe to the view that no model can faithfully represent reality, but detailed, descriptive models are useful in learning about the system and bringing about a qualitative jump in understanding of the system it attempts to model – provided they are properly validated. Our own approach to model evaluation is to consider the entire life cycle and assess the validity under two broad dimensions of (1) internally focused validity/quality achieved through structural, methodological, and ontological evaluations; and (2) external validity consisting of micro validity, macro validity, and qualitative, causal and narrative validity. In this paper, we also elaborate on selected validation techniques that we have employed in the past. We recommend a triangulation of multiple validation techniques, including methodological soundness, qualitative validation techniques, such as face validation by experts and narrative validation, and formal validation tests, including correspondence testing

A grammar of Kalamang : The Papuan language of the Karas Islands

This thesis is a grammar of Kalamang, a Papuan language of western New Guinea in the east of Indonesia. It is spoken by around 130 people on the biggest of the Karas Islands. This grammar is based on 11 months of fieldwork. The primary source of data is a corpus of more than 15 hours of spoken Kalamang recorded and transcribed between 2015 and 2019. The grammar covers a wide range of topics beyond a phonological and morphosyntactic description, including prosody, narrative styles, and information structure. More than 1000 examples illustrate the analyses, and are where possible taken from naturalistic spoken Kalamang. The descriptive approach in this grammar is informed by current linguistic theory, but is not driven by any specific school of thought. Comparison to other eastern Indonesian languages is taken into account whenever it is deemed helpful. Kalamang has several typologically interesting features, such as unpredictable stress, minimalistic give-constructions consisting of just two pronouns, aspectual markers that follow the subject, and the NP and predicate – rather than the noun and verb – as important domains of attachment.This grammar is accompanied by a an openly accessible archive of linguistic and cultural material (http://hdl.handle.net/10050/00-0000-0000-0003-C3E8-1@view) and a dictionary (dictionaria.clld.org/contributions/kalamang), and serves as a document of one of the world’s many endangered languages