Feedback
To work well, a living process must not merely be step by step. It must be step by step with a built-in feedback of such a kind that each step taken can be checked at once for the increase of life which will occur, accepted if it has it, rejected if it does not.
During design, typically, we start with a schematic drawing. This drawing, being complex, usually contains hundreds (if not thousands) of decisions. Yet these decisions, if we separate them from one another, have been made on paper without one of them being tested.
When I say that a typical design drawing represents as many as a hundred decisions, I am talking about the small, item-by-item decisions which happen in an unfolding process. Of course, we could also claim that a typical schematic or development drawing it just one decision. But my whole point is that this one schematic drawing actually contains a plethora of small decisions that can be separated from one another. When you count them in this fashion, there may indeed be as many as a hundred in a single drawing.
Often not one of the hundred steps which led to its creation has been tested, nor have we, the architects, had available to us a contemporary method of designing which can give us real feedback, step by step, as we work it out.
But the effect of a complex building space on the people in it is more complex; it is not, at present, quantifiable, nor is it reliably experienced by means of the three-dimensional images and super graphics in computer simulations. As a result, no amount of computer simulation tells us what we want to know, which is, “How does it feel, what is its visceral effect on us?” In the absence of this kind of feedback, the building cannot be significantly improved because its feeling cannot be intensified.
What about latest advances in VR?
In today’s practice, such models are rarely used for design purposes. Models are very often used for presentation, but that is quite another matter, one that does not contribute to design or feedback.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/8 Step-by-step adaptation#