Drawing and conceiving space:how to express spatial experience through drawing?

Teaching drawing in architectural education raises questions regarding the representation of spatial experiences: to what extent can sensory experiences of space be intensified through observing and drawing and, perhaps equally important, what those drawings would look like? In the context of their drawing classes, the authors started to inquire the discrepancy between conceiving and perceiving space, and the aptitude of representing spatial concepts upon a two dimensional surface. Through observation and translating observation into drawings, students discover that conventionalised ways of drawing, such as linear perspective, only reveal part of the story. While linear perspective remains the dominant way of representing space, obviously visible in photography, film, 3D-imaging and architectural impressions, the authors started looking for ways of drawing which inquire possibilities of expressing spatial experiences. Drawing as an activity which is able to enhance spatial understanding, rather than as a tool to communicate virtual spaces. Next to drawing as a 'skill', which can be learnt, the drawing classes started to inquire non-visual aspects of space by analysing attributes of spatiality, which are difficult to convey through two dimensional drawings. Starting from a contextualisation of spatial drawing within architectural practice, the article examines the discrepancy between geometric space and lived space, in order to reveal the dubious role of linear perspective within (architectural) culture and history. After a brief return to how we imagined and represented space in our childhood, the article presents a series of practice based examples. Drawing on the authors' teaching practice, it illustrates possibilities to expand our visual language by exploring space and spatiality through observing and drawing.</p

Capturing architects’ designerly ways of knowing about users: Exploring an ethnographic research approach

Transferring knowledge about diverse users’ experiences from research into architectural design practice is not straightforward. Effective knowledge transfer requires taking into account architects’ design practice. This paper explores a research approach to gain insight into architects’ designerly ways of knowing about users. It discusses why an ethnographic research approach offers a means to study a culture of practice such as architectural design practice. A fieldwork account from a pilot study in an architecture firm provides insight into the experiential issues architects deal with. It illustrates how fieldwork techniques can be applied to map the socio-material aspects (e.g., different stakeholders and design materials) that mediate knowledge about users. Exploiting these aspects of architectural design practice is expected to open new ways of thinking about informing architects about users’ experiences. For instance, there lies an opportunity in engaging architects’ creative representational skills, which challenges architects’ and researchers’ roles in knowledge transfer

Populating architectural design: Introducing scenario-based design in residential care projects

Copyright: © 2019 van der Linden, Dong, & Heylighen. Despite the very aim of designing living environments for people, the perspectives of the end users are underrepresented in architectural design processes. Architects are expected to address the challenges of a diverse and ageing society but, due to increasingly complex design processes, they often have limited access to the perspectives of those they are designing for. This study aims to bring people’s spatial experience to the foreground in architects’ design processes, by turning to techniques developed by related design disciplines. More precisely, it analyses the potential of scenario-based design, a family of techniques for exploring user experience in design, which architects are largely unfamiliar with. Based on elements like personas, scenarios, and user journeys, a scenario-based design approach tailored to architectural design’s particularities was developed. Test workshops were conducted in two architecture firms involved in designing residential care projects, and findings were discussed with an expert panel. Findings illustrate how these workshops offered architects insight into user profiles and themes, facilitated exploring and diversifying potential futures during design development, and supported communication with team members and the client. Additional opportunities and challenges are identified, which can advance the development of an integrated approach to support architects in designing human-centred environments.Flanders Innovation and Entrepreneurship; PhD Fellowship of the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO)

Revenge by photoshop: Memefying police acts in the public dialogue about injustice

In this article, we are interested in the role digital memes in the form of pictures play in the framing of public discourses about police injustice and what it is that makes memes successful in this process. For this purpose, we narrate the story of one such meme: the ‘pepper-spray cop’. In our analysis, we link the creation and spread of the meme to the democratization of online activism and the subversive acts of hierarchical sousveillance. Based on our findings, we discuss features of the meme and the process linked to its initiation, rapid spread and disappearance as vital for the success of visual memes in the context of online protests

a.SCatch: semantic structure for architectural floor plan retrieval

Architects’ daily routine involves working with drawings. They use either a pen or a computer to sketch out their ideas or to do a drawing to scale. We therefore propose the use of a sketch-based approach when using the floor plan repository for queries. This enables the user of the system to sketch a schematic abstraction of a floor plan and search for floor plans that are structurally similar. We also propose the use of a visual query language, and a semantic structure as put forward by Langenhan. An algorithm extracts the semantic structure sketched by the architect on DFKI’s Touch& Write table and compares the structure of the sketch with that of those from the floor plan repository. The a.SCatch system enables the user to access knowledge from past projects easily. Based on CBR strategies and shape detection technologies, a sketch-based retrieval gives access to a semantic floor plan repository. Furthermore, details of a prototypical application which allows semantic structure to be extracted from image data and put into the repository semi-automatically are provided

Networked buffering: a basic mechanism for distributed robustness in complex adaptive systems

A generic mechanism - networked buffering - is proposed for the generation of robust traits in complex systems. It requires two basic conditions to be satisfied: 1) agents are versatile enough to perform more than one single functional role within a system and 2) agents are degenerate, i.e. there exists partial overlap in the functional capabilities of agents. Given these prerequisites, degenerate systems can readily produce a distributed systemic response to local perturbations. Reciprocally, excess resources related to a single function can indirectly support multiple unrelated functions within a degenerate system. In models of genome:proteome mappings for which localized decision-making and modularity of genetic functions are assumed, we verify that such distributed compensatory effects cause enhanced robustness of system traits. The conditions needed for networked buffering to occur are neither demanding nor rare, supporting the conjecture that degeneracy may fundamentally underpin distributed robustness within several biotic and abiotic systems. For instance, networked buffering offers new insights into systems engineering and planning activities that occur under high uncertainty. It may also help explain recent developments in understanding the origins of resilience within complex ecosystems. \ud \u

Methodological Guidelines for Engineering Self-organization and Emergence

The ASCENS project deals with the design and development of complex self-adaptive systems, where self-organization is one of the possible means by which to achieve self-adaptation. However, to support the development of self-organising systems, one has to extensively re-situate their engineering from a software architectures and requirements point of view. In particular, in this chapter, we highlight the importance of the decomposition in components to go from the problem to the engineered solution. This leads us to explain and rationalise the following architectural strategy: designing by following the problem organisation. We discuss architectural advantages for development and documentation, and its coherence with existing methodological approaches to self-organisation, and we illustrate the approach with an example on the area of swarm robotics