Conditional Design

Conditional design is a design method formulated by the graphic designers Luca Maurer, Jonathan Puckey, Roel Wouters and the artist Edo Paulus, in which conditions and rules of play are drawn up that invite cooperation within a 'regulated' process towards an unpredictable design or result.

Conditional design is the sequel to Operative Design. This book will further explore the operative in a more detailed, intentional, and perhaps functional manner. Spatially, the conditional is the result of the operative. It is not a blind result however. Both terms work together to satisfy a formal manipulation through a set of opportunities for elements such as connections and apertures.

The core idea for this book is the use of operative verbs as tools for designing space. These operative verbs abstract the idea of spatial formation to its most basic terms, allowing for an objective approach to create the foundation for subjective spatial design. Examples of these verbs are expand, inflate, nest, wist, lift, embed, merge and many more. Together they form a visual dictionary decoding the syntax of spatial verbs. The verbs are illustrated with three-dimensional diagrams and pictures of designs which show the verbs 'in action'. This approach was devised, tested, and applied to architectural studio instruction by Anthony Di Mari and Nora Yoo while teaching at Harvard University's Career Discovery Program in Architecture in 2010. As instructors and as recent graduates, they saw a need for this kind of catalogue from both sides - as a reference manual applicable to design students in all stages of their studies, as well as a teaching tool for instructors to help students understand the strong spatial potential of abstract operations.

An attempt to free architecture from site and program constraints and to counter the profusion of ever bigger architecture books with ever smaller content. Some may call it the first manifesto of the twenty-first century, for it lays down a new way to think about architecture. Others may think of it as the last architectural treatise, for it provides a discursive container for ideas that would otherwise be lost. Whatever genre it belongs to, SITELESS is a new kind of architecture book that seems to have come out of nowhere. Its author, a young French architect practicing in Tokyo, admits he “didn't do this out of reverence toward architecture, but rather out of a profound boredom with the discipline, as a sort of compulsive reaction.” What would happen if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program, and budget? he asks. The result is a book that is saturated with forms, and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published. The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain link towers, ball bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing—and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from. The forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) but from a constant viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series. After setting down 1001 forms in siteless conditions and embryonic stages, Blanciak takes one of the forms and performs a “scale test,” showing what happens when one of these fantastic ideas is subjected to the actual constraints of a site in central Tokyo. The book ends by illustrating the potential of these shapes to morph into actual building proportions.

PRECEDENTS IN ARCHITECTURE

A completely revised edition, offering new design recipes for interactive programs and support for images as plain values, testing, event-driven programming, and even distributed programming. This introduction to programming places computer science at the core of a liberal arts education. Unlike other introductory books, it focuses on the program design process, presenting program design guidelines that show the reader how to analyze a problem statement, how to formulate concise goals, how to make up examples, how to develop an outline of the solution, how to finish the program, and how to test it. Because learning to design programs is about the study of principles and the acquisition of transferable skills, the text does not use an off-the-shelf industrial language but presents a tailor-made teaching language. For the same reason, it offers DrRacket, a programming environment for novices that supports playful, feedback-oriented learning. The environment grows with readers as they master the material in the book until it supports a full-fledged language for the whole spectrum of programming tasks. This second edition has been completely revised. While the book continues to teach a systematic approach to program design, the second edition introduces different design recipes for interactive programs with graphical interfaces and batch programs. It also enriches its design recipes for functions with numerous new hints. Finally, the teaching languages and their IDE now come with support for images as plain values, testing, event-driven programming, and even distributed programming.

Design Research uses scientific methods to evaluate designs and build design theories. This book starts with recognizable questions in Design Research, such as A/B testing, how users learn to operate a device and why computer-generated faces are eerie. Using a broad range of examples, efficient research designs are presented together with statistical models and many visualizations. With the tidy R approach, producing publication-ready statistical reports is straight-forward and even non-programmers can learn this in just one day. Hundreds of illustrations, tables, simulations and models are presented with full R code and data included. Using Bayesian linear models, multi-level models and generalized linear models, an extensive statistical framework is introduced, covering a huge variety of research situations and yet, building on only a handful of basic concepts. Unique solutions to recurring problems are presented, such as psychometric multi-level models, beta regression for rating scales and ExGaussian regression for response times. A “think-first” approach is promoted for model building, as much as the quantitative interpretation of results, stimulating readers to think about data generating processes, as well as rational decision making. New Statistics for Design Researchers: A Bayesian Workflow in Tidy R targets scientists, industrial researchers and students in a range of disciplines, such as Human Factors, Applied Psychology, Communication Science, Industrial Design, Computer Science and Social Robotics. Statistical concepts are introduced in a problem-oriented way and with minimal formalism. Included primers on R and Bayesian statistics provide entry point for all backgrounds. A dedicated chapter on model criticism and comparison is a valuable addition for the seasoned scientist.

Refactoring is gaining momentum amongst the object oriented programming community. It can transform the internal dynamics of applications and has the capacity to transform bad code into good code. This book offers an introduction to refactoring.