4.6
Open Design

Thoughts on software and the representation of movement

Mark Meagher

As any student of architecture soon discovers, discussion of an architectural project necessitates some means of representation, all the more so when movement through it is being considered. As will already be evident from the varied contributions in this book, the experience of moving through an existing work of architecture or landscape is influenced by a great diversity of factors that include, but are not limited to, cues found in the physical environment. All the senses are involved in this experience, along with a range of tacit and explicit influences, such as the time of year, the weather and the company of those who share it. As an entirety, the experience remains beyond description, for all attempts to communicate it are selective, each medium having only the capacity to capture specific aspects. Film merges the acoustical element with the visual; measured drawings such as sections capture multiple aspects affecting the spatial quality; and physical models allow the spatial distinctions offered by binocular vision and the possibility of showing material and tectonic considerations.

The desire to anticipate the experiential qualities of an imagined building or landscape is certainly not limited to computational media, but this chapter will investigate how software lets us anticipate aspects of architectural experience and decide what kinds of choice we can make. I will consider several techniques for working with and understanding the movement of people using the computer, asking in each case what the underlying relationship is between representation and the reality it aims to communicate. Software is primarily about enabling communication – taking something inchoate and making it clear – and I will consider various attempts at designing architectural software that is intended to fulfil this desire for clarity.

The representation of movement provides a demanding test for designers of software, for it comes with in-built presuppositions about the world, about what is important and what can safely be ignored. When choosing a type of software to understand movement, one is obliged to make choices about how the complex reality of experience can be reduced to something quantitatively described and modelled. Most users are unaware of the epistemological predispositions of their digital tools, which are not often exposed to view, for software usually works as a ‘black box’, that is a closed system that can be described without recourse to an understanding of its inner workings. So long as one understands what is acceptable as input, the software will produce an acceptable output. The black-box approach has benefits in terms of usability, and, as long as the output conforms to one’s expectations, there is no need to tinker with settings or customize the behaviour of the model. Only when the model fails to produce meaningful results or to meet necessary expectations must one open up its inner workings, exposing both the presuppositions of the software and the understanding of reality on which it depends.

Marshall McLuhan observed that new media tend to adopt the content of those they have replaced, and much design software adopts the metaphors and content of pre-digital forms of representation.1 It is possible, for example, for a designer to use Photoshop without understanding image-compression algorithms, and many of the tools provided, such as dodging and burning, employ metaphors taken from the photographic darkroom. Similarly, early word-processing software mimicked closely the experience of writing on a typewriter, including, of course, the qwerty keyboard designed to avoid mechanical clashes, and computer-aided design (CAD) software initially imitated the process of 2D drafting with a mechanical drawing instrument, such as the drafting arm, mayline or T-square. At first glance, such software appears to serve the simple purpose of translating content from one medium to another, providing a more efficient means of representing and storing the same information. Early adopters of CAD software could hardly have imagined the profound impact their decision would have on every aspect of design, but the limitations of early CAD software have been summarized by John Frazer, pioneer in design computing:

The introduction of CAD changed, not only the manual activity of drawing a line, but also the understanding of the relation between the act of drawing and the thing drawn (in this case, the imagined building or landscape). CAD shows up the close relation of design process to design outcome, revealing how a tool intended to smoothly move design information from an analogue to digital format had the unintended consequence of transforming the entire design process.

Whereas early CAD software attempted to recreate the experience of pre-digital ways of working, more recent architectural software involved different metaphors. The conventions of orthographic 2D drafting in architecture and engineering were incrementally replaced by techniques of design based on 3D models. The screen still required the flattening of the 3D representation on to a 2D surface, but the process of translation was concealed in the software, rather than explicitly addressed in the making of the drawing. Unlike the physical process of drawing a perspective or an orthographic projection, in which the representation is ‘constructed’ following a set of standard procedures for ‘flattening’ 3D objects on a 2D plane, 3D modelling software presents a (usually) perspectival view of the model that appears more ‘realistic’ than orthographic projection, but obscures the conventions of projection underlying it. Like the drawing, the digital model is an abstraction that allows one to work on the imagined project, but, unlike the drawing, the software collapses the distinction between drawing and building, making a highly abstract application of projective geometry appear as a direct manipulation of the thing itself. The fact that 3D modelling is in itself a form of projection based on the principles of descriptive geometry remains fully concealed in most software used to produce digital models, for they focus instead on intuitive operations that reproduce physical modelling techniques, such as carving, lofting and mirroring.

This sense of working directly on the building was enhanced by moving beyond the keyboard as interface. The invention of the computer mouse in the early 1960s3 was based on the idea that digital information could be manipulated and handled in the same way as we hold and move physical objects in space. Ever since, the way we interact with digital information on the screen has been based largely on spatial metaphors, and our understanding of digital models assumes that the screen is a window through which we can view and directly manipulate information that is inherently spatial.