Appendix

Architectural Programming and Scenarios

This section discusses and describes components of both scenario planning and architectural programming. While these things may be of specific interest to professionals in these areas, they shed important light on the preceding parts of this document, and begin to inform about how these things can best be used. Again, the project holds some unique challenges both for the organization and for Design. The following items are meant to facilitate learning for the purpose of more effective action, as well as the progression of the human understanding of the meaning of things.

Here's the thing.

In Architectural Programming, factors are broken down into these categories.

Goals Facts Concepts Needs Problem

The process of identifying goals, researching and refining facts, configuring possible concepts all leads to the identification of needs. It is this set of needs that are then composed in the Problem statement.

Scenarios are a way of holding needs in relational contexts. They allow for consideration of a varied set of environmental future circumstances that may effect the tone, priority, or nature of the Needs. By way of this they also allow for multiple projections of the relationship of the needs to each other, illuminating what may end up being complex dynamic relations. By way of this process consideration is given to the dynamic possibilities and strategies can emerge that may result not only in defending against disadvantageous turns in environmental factors but also can identify possible strategic advances. Also at least through the consideration of multiple options, there is by form an acknowledgement that there is not one solution, which helps to temper the force with which singular solutions are willed to be, even in the face of contrary information. This is especially relevant to architecture with its complex demands involving many variables and its impact on function, economy, meaning, and community.

In addition and maybe of the most importance is how dynamically in architecture the problem shifts in the process of construction, how a form (even if it is modeled and tested) once built and experienced, shifts the understanding of its meaning and what the needs are. This happens all along the process. (And as CJones says it is always important to use the most recent information.) Even with no surprises from architect, estimates, construction, time, cost overruns . . . this impact is significant: and too great a dynamic to risk by a singular static projection of needs.

From the scenarios can be extracted overall implications for the project as viewed through the particular projections. At this stage questions may arise for the organization about prioritization of needs or clarifications of commitments, and strategic choices based on mission and ideology.

The scenario "Implications" explicate the needs analytically. --program - design brief. (more detailed programming and modeling can occur around broader decisions and strategies that emerge from these implications and the scenarios themselves.) "Leading Indicators" and "signposts" from scenarios guide process -(design, construction, continuous change).

As forms are made scenarios continue to evolve based on point of view and experience by the form.

Form, Function, Time and Economy
or
Structuring, Sustaining, Experiencing

In architectural programming needs are assessed and divided into the Categories of Form, Function, Time and Economy. These divisions and focus carry with them tricky implications. They facilitate a mechanical application implying that the parts are static.

This is most evident in Form and Function. As we have acknowledged in Brand and other sources, form is not static (as implied by the word) and function is to easily reduced to utility. Also the division of time as separate from space/movement/experience is problematic.

Structuring, sustaining, and experiencing are verbs and are distinguished from FFTE in three important ways. 1. They are participatory- the words imply involvement/management/effort/will/resources. 2. They are interdependent [ they are related and dynamically connected in their primary form - they do not require being set in motion. 3. They are embedded in the context of time.

FFTE works in static situations but is not functional in environments or situations of dynamic change. The problem comes when one plans for potential future FFTE's when those futures are highly uncertain. The FFTE distinctions force a level of detailed static projections. The projections of possible futures most likely will fail in their over-prescription of "futurist" ideas. They also are not productive in facilitating effective and informative progressive change toward that point.

This is where the importance of the inclusion of experience becomes evident. Use of this consideration allows for focus to be placed on the point of connection between form and idea, or to put it another way, doing and thinking. This loci is the point that holds potential for new doing and awareness of the prescriptive influence of the form (chosen or given structure) on thinking and doing. It is the point that holds the potential for the unification of utility and beauty in a form that serves a whole performative function. Considerations similar to this are left out of traditional programming and design.

Form is important and critical, but highly complex in its multi-valiancy, slipping easily from meaning to meaning. It involves and represents physical function, kinesthetic movement, affective feel, but also cognitive forming. It's physicalness both supports and prescribes function, movement, and feeling in the space. But in addition through experience of the form it provides models of organization and meaning for other doing and thinking. It the end this is its most important function.


The problem in context

Detail / Form / Politics

Diving into specific problems at a high level of detail (FFTE) is often the most effective means of getting a grasp of the work. The danger in this comes when one gets stuck in the point of view of that construct and forgets the assumptions one takes up to get there. So programming or modeling is an essential technique for hooking the problem at a specific and experiential level, but dangerous because of the ease of attachment to forms.

Buildings are about the use factor (performance) for the user, and so architectural design is highly political. Design decisions determine the ease or complexity of function, but they also determine and define the physical environment that people have to think with and in. Each design is the expenditure of an new opportunity to make possible new thinking and doing by way of experience with form. Forms have the potential to provide model structures for how to organize and value ideas (of how to function, how to think of UICA, how to work with ideas). Because of the multi-valiancy of form, the restriction of the FFTE approach, and the lack of an effective means of mediating among these things, architectural programming and design become highly political and non-communicative.

Design solutions often then become politically negotiated solutions among people and groups who are restricted to communicating their experiential (multi-valiant) concerns in terms of form/function. These elements are so slippery in meaning that people can talk at length about the same "thing" and really be using it to hold for each quite different concerns.

Consequently the politically negotiated solution:

1. is negotiated based on a false uniformity of language (in form). Based on a false agreement about the shared meaning of form.

2. because the more primary elements of experience (and thought) are not dealt with (but represented misrepresented in form) the solution both gains (negative -noise) and looses (positive -fidelity) meaning through the abstracted processes of communication and translation.

A means needs to be developed for working with this in a way that mediates communication and agreement, while it acknowledges, respects, and refines peoples minds as well as their bodies.

Buildings, Planning, Strategic Planning

The same problems with FFTE happen in strategic planning (and other techniques of projection). The form of the language (abstractions) prescribe a certain kind of thinking.

This brings up an important observation about art and utility. The making of a new language for a new circumstance can be considered art - poetry. But art, when viewed as (by its nature) not having utility, the necessarily it is not productive, nor does it lead to productivity.

The failing of this is that strategic planning language and processes, or science, or math all began as poetry and art. They were new forms for new circumstances, and ones use of those forms (which have become techniques) is best done with remembrance that they were made- picked up - chosen as tools.

Because buildings are forms that hold utility, beauty, experience, function, they serve as strong metaphoric source for the unification of meanings. They can hold in an embodied (experiencable) way great amounts of information. This is partly because of the multi-valiancy of form, and is specifically why they are so hard to work with (especially in planning).

Therefore, solutions to this form problem, that provide an effective language and process that facilitate communication without denigrating human experience, are highly disseminable to other human endeavors, planning, community building, government, cultural resolution making. . . .

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