Physiological and cognitive discontinuities: From mythical mediation to implicit discretization of architectural design tools

Abstract

In architectural design, representation tools are often compared according to their alleged effects on the creativity of designers. Moreover, their mediating capacities are often mythicized, to such an extent that one might surmise the direct transmission of the mental images from the designer’s consciousness to an external representation. In this speculative essay, we demonstrate that the process of representation at work in architectural design originates from the designer’s consciousness natural cognitive ability, rather than from the use of a specific mediation tool between the designer and his environment, between the mentally constructed architectural project and its representation. The effects of any tool of representation—analog or digital—on our perceptual apparatus depend primarily on the cognitive mechanisms affecting the discontinuous flow of internal representations formed by our consciousness. In other words, we propose to shed a new light on these limitations through the heuristic modeling of an architectural project designer confronted with his own cognitive biases, and the limits of the representation processes. In the present essay, the discontinuities and uncertainties inherent to the processes of representation are reintegrate in the models.

Key words： Architecture; Design; Representation; Discretization; Discontinuity; Digital; Analog; Uncertainty