Operative Translations: Diagrams Between the Analog and the Digital in Early Design Education

As new spatial information technologies expand the data available for design,coherent navigation and knowledge-building via diagrammatic systemswill be increasingly necessary in order to manage and access content.1 Further,the form of that navigation will be the critical issue. This paper arguesfor the diagram to be the structure for that query, and specifically, for thecritical role of diagrammatic work in beginning studios through examiningthe catalytic function of diagrams within the design process. This issue isforegrounded by developments in digital media in recent years that facilitateworking iteratively and transformationally: As parametric modeling enablesserial, carefully calibrated transformations of specific relationships, and as3D modeling software becomes the default method for development of ideasin early design education, questions arise about the changing role of thediagram in early design education.In addition to arguments for the diagram as navigation, it has also beenargued that the diagram becomes merged with, or supplants architectureas the built outcome of the design process – built work seen as only onemanifestation of the wealth of virtual possibilities spread open by the diagram.2 Yet in design education, diagrams are not typically thought of asthe object of design, and there is need for a theory on understanding andteaching diagrams. The challenges ahead lie not only in managing the flowof information, but more fundamentally, in the designer’s relationship toknowledge and in the diagram as the tool to make this knowledge operative.Diagrams – Deleuze’s “abstract machine”3 – distill the wealth and complexityof information to its essential systems and relationships in order tomake it available for transformation, transposition and extension in an openendedprocess. As an “instrumentalizing technique”4, they set in motion agenerative process that escapes the ‘sign’, and avoids ‘type’ and cliché. Positingthe importance of a balance between digital and analog skills in earlydesign education, this paper critically reflects on the generative content ofdiagrams that are situated at the intersection of the digital and the material.As diagrams become the vehicle for translating information from one mediuminto another, systems and relationships are extracted as generative‘DNA’ – a code embedded with variable parameters. This paper examinesthe contribution of ‘abstraction’ (extracting information) and ‘translation’(between 2D and 3D, between digital and material) to the production ofknowledge through diagramming. Diagrams, here, operate as iterative researchinto possibilities embedded in material and organizational systems.The paper uses as case studies three ways of embedding diagrammaticexplorations in introductory studio courses: 2D translations between serialstudies in physical modeling (3D material to 2D digital to 3D material);iterative translations of 2D precedent work into constructs of varying materialsystems (2D surface to 2D line to 3D material); lastly, diagrams producedin site and precedent analysis (translations within 2D, extended viaGrasshopper). The analysis of these case studies reflects on the emergingdialog of formal with performative criteria as critical components of operativetranslations: diagrams with generative potential in the contemporarydesign process.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1