ORO Editions

Experiential Design Schemas

Building a place in the world for elevated feeling is a difficult thing—to link the measurable and the unmeasurable. To have something to say about form and space that ennobles subjective inhabitation and offers utility for designers turns out to be even more challenging than we imagined. We count among our colleagues and friends those experts in the quantitative domain, a few masters of the artistic qualitative approach to design and the occasional practitioner of the "dark art "of architectural hermeneutics. Our work, a quest for which there can be no ultimate answers, somehow lies at the intersection of these multiple perspectives. Nevertheless, it occurs to us as a worthwhile, if humbling enterprise.

It is the inquiry itself that seems to be where the power is. We have tried to be rigorous in the way one can be rigorous with a thorny and multivariate problem. Information is present but the result is not, in the end, answers or solutions. Rather, we hope what becomes present as a result of this effort is an opening, a field of possibilities for both inhabitant and designer. In this realm, the realm of inhabited built environments, every way to look at it is partial—true but partial. We ask you simply to consider these schemas as possibilities. Stand in the perspective they present and look at architecture and life that way, and see what becomes possible for you and your life, your work, and those whom your work serves.

In the sections that follow we offer the results of our inquiry, not as definitions, but as suppositions. We draw inspiration from our mentor and colleague G Z Brown, who would say "Suppose this were the case......then what could be present?", calling this approach a design supposal, in contrast to a proposal. Each opens a world of potentials that might occur, not as a formula for designing feeling, nor as forms or things, but as thought domains inside of which many particular forms and expressions of the schema may emerge. We encourage you, when reading these, to form your own interpretations.

Five Distributions of Conditions

There are many frameworks for organizing thought about architectural experience and no singular right way to organize design knowledge or to access it. In developing our approach, we look at the conditions that drive experience and how people experience those different kinds of conditions. Often beginning from direct empiricism, we asked, What am I feeling? and, What is going on here that I am feeling? It can't be proven that the categories that follow are absolute or complete. What can be said is that they seem useful and, most of the time, in line with a first-person encounter with the phenomena. We first identify five types of distributions of conditions. Later, we add a sixth type, related to the phenomena but significantly different from the relatively more direct sensory concreteness addressed in the first set. The types of conditions constitute distinctions of conceptual domains that open and expand potential perceptions. Once a conditional type is distinguished (such as rhythms), one finds many occurrences of the type emerging for different forces at various scales.