Logs from the Tumblr field

In 1972 psychologist, architect and design researcher Bryan Lawson conducted an empirical study to investigate the difference between problem-focused solvers and solution-focused solvers. He took two groups of students – final year students in architecture and post-graduate science students – and asked them to create one-layer structures from a set of colored blocks. The perimeter of the structure had to optimize either the red or the blue color; however, there were unspecified rules governing the placement and relationship of some of the blocks. Lawson found that: 

The scientists adopted a technique of trying out a series of designs which used as many different blocks and combinations of blocks as possible as quickly as possible. Thus they tried to maximise the information available to them about the allowed combinations. If they could discover the rule governing which combinations of blocks were allowed they could then search for an arrangement which would optimise the required colour around the layout. [problem-focused] By contrast, the architects selected their blocks in order to achieve the appropriately coloured perimeter. If this proved not to be an acceptable combination, then the next most favourably coloured block combination would be substituted and so on until an acceptable solution was discovered. [solution-focused] 

 — Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think

Nigel Cross concluded that Lawson's studies suggested that scientists problem solve by analysis, while designers problem solve by synthesis. Kelley and Brown argue that design thinking uses both analysis and synthesis.

Suchman, (2007: p.227)

THINK PUBLIC SPACE [The New Publicness]

Cities around Europe are grounds of ever intensifying conflict between two paradigms. On the one hand side we are witnesses of urban development as an infrastructure of global capital, and on the other hand side the traditional idea of maintaining the concept of a city as a political place in which sovereignty thrives on public squares. While the first paradigm sees the private interests necessarily transform into public ones, the other looks upon public sphere as the last defensive line against gentrification. Architecture, in this case acts as a discipline providing the spatial and physical framework for this conflict of interests in public space.

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As the public space of a city is a key place of conflict of economical and political paradigms of the society the task is to respond to the question of architecture’s ability (as a specific discipline) to intervene in this process. What is actually the support and function of architecture in times of growing economical and political instability and its repercussions on public space? Is architecture forced to rely on its own knowledge, its own form in these times, or, and how to include other disciplines in co-creating the public sphere? Or is this a hidden opportunity to liberate architecture of superfluous narratives? In the end, to what extent can architectural form play the role of the universal form, a place in which conditions for creating an Event are formed, in which interests and conflicts are mitigated and which constitutes a public sphere and a physical space for all users? Scenarios are to be created of human interaction and their manifestations in public space of a city within the European context.

(…)

From: http://www.think-space.org/en/think-public-space/competition/competition-brief/

MIT Media Lab

By Jonathan Chomko and Matthew Rosier.

All over Europe, we see new forms of cooperation and collaboration – “commoning”: the collective venture of sharing, collaboration, negotiation and creative production. Citizens and communities are developing alternative democratic practices.

‘Build the City’, is about applying the principles and ethics of the commons to the transformation of the city, its communities and its economy. It is about people creating more sustainable cities through social cooperation and active participation, with culture at its heart.

‘The City’ here does not refer exclusively to urban environments and infrastructure. In this instance ‘The City’ can refer to a neighbourhood or community where people are working together through cultural activities to shape their environments, improve life in the city, and develop new social and economic relationships between people.