From Intuition to Precision

Abstract

Design has been described as making inspire decisions with incomplete information. True, we may use prior knowledge, we may even think we understand the causalites involved, but what really matters is exploration: of new forms, of new materials, and speculation about the response to the resulting effects. Essentially, this exploration has its own dynamics, involving intuition and spontaneity, and without which there is no design. But of course we all know that this is not the whole story. Design is different to 'craft'; to directly 'making' or 'doing'. It necessarily has to be predictive in order to anticipate what the consequence of the 'making' or 'doing' will be. Therefore we inevitably have to counter balance our intuition with a well developed sense of premeditation. We have to be able to reason about future events, about the consequence of something that has not yet being made. There is always going to be an advantage if this reasoning can be achieved with a degree of precision. So how can we progress from intuition to precision? What abstractions can we use to represent, externalize and test the concepts involved? How can we augment the cognitive processes? How can we record the progression of ideas? And, how do we know when we have arrived? Design has a symbiotic relationship with geometry. There are many design issues that are independent of any specific configurations. We might call these “pre-geometric” issues. And having arrived at a particular configuration, there may be many material interpretations of the same geometry. We might call these “post-geometric” issues. But geometry is central to design, and without appropriate geometric understanding, the resulting design will be limited. Geometry has two distinct components, one is a formal descriptive system and the other is a process of subjective evaluation.