FACTUAL DESIGN

Show me the facts.
Where’s the facts?
Just the facts, maam.

Architects and designers need more facts. If we can establish visual facts, we will operate with a much higher degree of objectivity. The pretty pictures that we draw would then be in substantiation of facts. Design facts. Visual facts. Paradigm facts.  Factual design.

I have recommended in a previous post that we drop the word style altogether. Style should be replaced with the word paradigm. This link will take you to a simple introduction to the style / paradigm substitution concept.

In the scientific experimental method, facts are what are manipulated. Extensive and expensive effort goes into either confirming, or discarding, facts. Facts are then determined to either support, or not, the paradigm. The overriding goal of the experimental model is to make significant factual determinations. Another meta goal is to increase the accuracy of facts. It is common for complicated and expensive scientific machines to be built so as to simply increase the accuracy of facts. Think of telescopes. Or microscopes. Or atomic colliders.

Science establishes facts based on aspects of nature. Science engages in extensive fact gathering. To move design into a more factual mode of understanding, we need to conduct factual design investigations. We need to determine which visual fact supports our paradigm.

And this shift to include facts can be started with reasonable ease. The first thing that we need to do is change our vocabulary. Imagine a design discussion with your client in which terms like architectural paradigm and visual facts are bandied about. How would this discussion go?

Let’s say we are working to provide a gable design solution. Let’s say that this gable solution is required by approval boards. All around us are structures in the Greek Revival architectural style. When resolving the roof slope, instead of saying that a 6/12 gable roof slope “won’t look good” because it is too shallow when compared with the surrounding architectural style, what if we said that experimental investigation has proven the visual fact that an 8/12 roof slope is required for our paradigm.

Something as simple as a vocabulary shift will remove the blinders that are culturally installed on and in our heads. This sort of redefinition of our terms might then enable us to move our design efforts toward greater objectivity. If we are utilizing a set of facts that supports our paradigms, we might gain an additional validity and precision. We might add the terms constants, physical, unit, forces, to our design discussions. None of this removes the art from our art. It simply adds precision to our efforts.

This will be difficult. It is difficult for scientists, and this is the world they live in every day. The vast majority of scientists devote their lives to making incremental improvements to a paradigm. Large new machines and new amounts of money go into these investigations of factual refinement. Yet there is every reason to believe that design can gain greater specificity by thinking in terms of facts.