This thesis originated with the East River Project, a national collection of collaborative studios orchestrated by the Van Alen Institute in New York City. The project addresses the question of how best to energize and rehabilitate the decaying urban fabric on the banks of the East River in Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. The site which the Iowa State Laboratory for Experimental Design worked on compromises the East River Park (extending over a mile between 14th and Jackson Streets) and the structure that intersects it, the Williamsburg Bridge (spanning the river between Brooklyn and Manhattan at Delancey Street). The L.E.D. overlaid onto the project of proposing rehabilitation of the East River Park and its predominant structure (the bridge) its mission of exploring the interface of digital and physical tools in the design process.;As an integrated media studio, it addressed the problem from the standpoint that integrated media can best serve: design as an accretion of multiple small elements on a conceptual framing apparatus, small elements on a conceptual framing apparatus, small elements that can be constructed piecemeal and over a long period of time (as opposed to design as a process of master planning at the grand scale, which then proceeds to the small elements). Furthermore, this research was situated specifically within an epistemological milieu that is characterized by various possibilities of accretion and proliferation, the way in which these processes are conducted, and what they represent. This milieu compromises the 1851 Crystal Palace in London,;Hieronymous Bosch\u27s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, the model of the garden itself as the ongoing product of such processes (as well as the linear processes of conventional design), Material World (a collection of photographs of average families from many countries, each posed in front of its abode with all of its domestic possessions), James Joyce\u27s Finnegans Wake, and Owen Jones\u27s The Grammar of Ornament, among other nodes that describe this territory of proliferation of the everyday. The first \u27ordering\u27 of this research resulted in four drawings of the design of a Rapid Transit Station on the Williamsburg Bridge, connecting the bridge to the park. This thesis is the second ordering, a written work assisted by the drawings. Katleen Wouters, Six Nodes, Four Baskets
