2018-05-01.md

August 11, 2018 · View on GitHub

Book: Architectural Intelligence

Molly Wright Steenson

Notes

  • "Models serve as the measure of an idea"
  • "Contractors will have to face automation in construction just as the architects will have to face automation of design" - Minsky Marvin, 1974
  • About Sketchpad, 1964 The entire process is one of continuous communication between the designer and the machine, but one in which the designer is always in complete control. He is free to accept the implications of what he has done, as shown him by the computer, or to modify his original concept based on the implications ★.
  • "Heuristics" means "serving to discover" and was popularized by Geroge Pólya's 1945 book How to Solve It is about how people structured they own problem-solving.
  • Gestalt psychology, a branch of psychology that studies the relationship of the parts to the whole
  • Architecting is what designers and programmers call the design of complex system. They use "architect" as a verb.
  • "Design is an act of exploration; it is feedback-oriented, it requires a willingness to change, and it requires a sensitivity to the aesthetics of the final product." - Andrew Cohill Design Principle Number 3
  • A broader definition of experience and experience design, one that put humans and not users at the center. Garret 2016
  • "Demands of the form is context."
  • "The designer sense of organization."
  • "Symbolized concepts" - Dougas Engelbart
  • Technical voyeur.

Christopher Alexander

  • Alexander is often unpopular with architects, they dislike his moralistic tone and disagree with him that there is an objective notion of goodness to be found in architecture. [...] Architects ten not to see architecture as a truth to be proven.
  • 1964 already use a computer to Calculate and graph the relationships between requirements of a design problem
  • design problem as an information problem.
  • The ability to bring a system back to equilibrium is ultrastability
  • "Most designers were intrinsically biased, likely to have the solution in mind before they began"
  • He try to designing for networks at the scale of cities. Applying social network analysis to architectural and urban design, it is remarkable.
  • Alexander noted for "tendencies" as "needs." Because people do not always know what their needs.
  • I ... want to state, publicly that I reject the whole idea of design methods. [...] I think it is absurd to separate the study of designing from the practice of design." ★
  • "a finite system of rules witch a person can use to generate an infinite variety of buildings."
  • People argue that his ideas work in the abstract but not in practice: An argument that is Alexander continues over the years experimented with trees, semilattices, and pattern networks, only to discover that he didn't like the geometry and the architecture that resulted.
  • "As they design interfaces that control more and more of the world, there are potentially outsize consequences for the design and programming decisions they make."

Richard Saul Wurman

  • Creator of TED
  • "In short in the desire to win, we had lost." (what if, could-be)
  • "to making information inform - finding the form in information"
  • Typologies information
  • Information architecture is the form of rhetoric.
  • Humans have shaped computers more than they have shaped us.
  • TED is a middlebrow megachurch infotainment... a combination of epiphany and personal testimony (an 'epiphimony' if you like) We need talk about TED ★
  • If you want to be relevant, you need to be open to an enormous multiplicity of values, interpretation, and readings. The old-fashioned Western 'this is' 'that is' is no longer tenable. [...] You can only understand something relative to something you understand.

Cedric Price

  • It wasn't about the building (software) themselves, it was about the interactions (behavior) that they could shape ★.
  • For Cetric architecture was an Infinite Games played not to determine a winner or a loser, but rather "for the purposes of continuing the play"
  • The boredom program: Boredom makes the industrial robot seem like a creature, like a living thing - just as boredom is what brings a building to life and makes it intelligent.
  • Price played on the boundary between information, materiality, and possibility.
  • What if we step away from the Vitruvian architectural ideals of firmitas, utilitas vernustas (solidness, function, and beauty)?

Nicholas Negroponte

  • Well-bred, well-spoken, and well-dressed
  • "Demo or die ethos."
  • Negroponte translate Symbiosis as "the intimate association of two dissimilar species (man and machine), two dissimilar process (design and computation), and two intelligent systems (the architect and the architecture machine)"
  • Automation isn't intelligence.
  • Command and control interfaces
  • "Project with a good demo was an attractive project to fund."
  • "Reduction was a dangerous weapon."
  • "Block world isolated certain problems while ignoring others."
  • The notion of information as place gives a spatial sense of the data
  • HUNCH. Microworlds, block worlds

Historical Notion

  • Design Methods movement.
  • Software Manifesto Mitch Kapor 1990: 
    - Kapor suggests that a "theory of design for software" could apply the Vitruvian concerts as "Firmness: A program should not have any bugs that inhibit its function. Commodity: A program should be suitable for the purposes for which it was intended. Delight: The experience of using the program should be a pleasurable one."
- Software design was a way to develop a common language that could mediate between users, business, and programmers
- "Design languages could be used for translating complex actions into simpler steps, [...] help someone master an unfamiliar task."
  • Important dates: 
    - By 2008, the lines intersect, and after 2009, interest in user experience overtakes that of information architecture.
- In 2005 Tim O'Reilly coined the term "Web 2.0."
- Jesse James Garret and his colleagues at Adaptive Path coined the term "AJAX."
- Social media exploded with Facebook, which launched on campuses in 2004, and, by 2007 was in heavy use by adults and teens.
- Twitter launched in 2006 and started becoming massively popular in 2007.
- Apple launched the iPhone in 2007 and Google Android in 2008.
  • The concept of user-friendliness wasn't even coined till 1972, and it took until the early 1980ss for it to become a common part of your vocabulary.
  • Memory palace technic comes from the Greek poet Simonides.

Quotes

  • Plato in Phaedrus (Fedro), "I am myself a great lover of these process of division and generalization; they help me to speak and to think. and if I find any man who is able to see 'a One and Many' in nature, him I follow, and 'walk in his footsteps as if he were a god'"
  • "patterns is the most disastrous thing about programming" because "trying to do that in computing is the assumption that we know anything at all about programming. So extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them in a way they don't deserve." - Alan Kay
  • "Form, 'a harmony of systems' generates design." - Louis Kahn
  • "The most profound technologies are those tath disappear" - Mark Weiser
  • "Virtuality is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns." - Katherine Hayles

People

Refs

  • The Design of Design
  • Make it New: The History of Silicon Valley Design
  • Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design
  • Cities: Comparation of Form and Scale
  • Technologies Freedom