This document summarizes key points from a lecture on virtual design. It discusses how: 1. The distinction between virtual and real is blurred, as design involves anticipating future experiences that do not yet physically exist. 2. Design exists in the relationship between virtual ideas/concepts and real, physical artifacts. 3. Designers should focus less on whether something is physical or digital, and more on how well designs enable experiences and solve problems.

1. Virtual Design
UNDERSTANDING DESIGN
DECO 1004
Lecture by Ricardo Sosa
2004

2. Conclusions
1. Virtual and real are relative categories
2. Design exists in the relation between
virtual and real
3. Designers shouldn’t care too much about
atoms/bits or hardware/software
4. Ultimately, in design terms the difference
physical-virtual is not important.
5. What is important is… (wait until the end!)

3. Virtual and real
• Particle physics:
– What are the
fundamental
(smallest)
building blocks
from which all
matter is made?

4. Elementary particles
• Standard Model: quarks
and leptons are
fundamental particles. No
evidence that refutes this
assumption, nor any
evidence for a size or
structure for any of these
particles (<10-19 meters).

5. Real and Virtual Particles
• Real Particles
– Particles that can be observed either directly or
indirectly in experiments are real particles.
• Virtual Particles
– Virtual particles are a language invented by physicists
in order to talk about processes in probability terms.
• It is meaningless to argue whether they are or are
not there, as they cannot be observed. Any
attempt to observe them changes the outcome of
the process.

6. Wave-particle duality
• Quarks behave as a wave, or as particles,
depending on what we do with them, and
what we try to observe.

7. Uncertainty principle
• We can't know everything we would like to
know about a particle. If we can't know the
position or momentum of a particle, does it
even have a specific value of position or
momentum? Or does the particle only have
these attributes when we measure them? The
surprising answers provided by quantum
physics seem to be: no and yes.

8. What is virtual?
• 1 : being such in essence or effect though
not formally recognized or admitted “a
virtual dictator”
• 2 : of, relating to, or being a of hypothetical
nature whose existence is inferred from
indirect evidence
• Design: interactive software as compared to
tangible hardware

9. Design is virtual

10. • “To design means to experience the table in
advance of its physical embodiment. Thus
designing is the virtual practical
experience.” Nadin (1997)
• Morello, A.: 2000, Design predicts the future when it
anticipates experience, Design Issues, 16(3), 35 –44.

11. • “Designers are all ‘futurologists’ to some
extent. The very essence of their job is to
create the future.” Lawson, B. (1997)

12. • The designer understands that the future is
not out there to be ‘discovered’, but it has to
be invented and designed (Fischer, 1998).

13. • “Design aims to innovate, to add something
new to what already exists.” Christiaans
(1992)

14. • There can be no
question that visual
mental imagery
involves visual
mechanisms.
• Subjects produce
eye movements
when they visualize
objects that are
similar to those
produced when they
perceive them.
(Kosslyn, 1997)

15. • “Subjects participated in perceptual and
imagery tasks while their brains were
scanned. Two-thirds of the activated areas
were activated in common… Subjects with
deficits in imagery and perception following
brain damage may confuse whether they
have actually seen a stimulus or merely
imagined seeing it.”

16. • “Nobody who has any kind of creative
imagination can possibly be anything but
disappointed with real life.” Aldous
Huxley (1894–1963)

17. • “The principle goal of education in the
schools should be creating men and women
who are capable of doing new things, not
simply repeating what other generations
have done; creative, inventive and
discoverers, who can be critical and
verify, and not accept, everything they are
offered.” Jean Piaget (1896–1980)

18. • “The act of creating artificial things which
have not previously existed in the real
world. Sandler (1994)
• “One designs in order to initiate change.”
Dasgupta (1996)
• “Designers are change agents in society.”
Gero, J. S. (1990)

19. • “The designer has a
prescriptive rather than
descriptive job. Unlike
scientists who describe
how the world is,
designers suggest how it
might be.”Lawson (1997)

20. • “The natural sciences are concerned with
the properties of things as they are whereas
design is concerned with the nature of
objects from the perspective of the purposes
they intend to serve; that is, with how things
ought to be."

21. • “Design is the precursor to all
manufacturing and production of a society's
artefacts, both real and virtual.” Gero (2002)

22. • Handcrafts and new technologies: end
product is the product itself:
“Tightening the loop between
conception and execution has the
potential to reconcile some of the
separation of design and fabrication
that industrialization had previously
imposed on craft. Thus, after two
centuries of separation, the conception
and the execution of everyday objects
are once again in the same hands
(CAD/CAM).” McCullough (1998)

23. • “The designer can see from a drawing how
the final design will look but, unfortunately,
not necessarily how it will work.” Lawson,
B. (1997)
• In design computing one can see throughout
the process how the final design –or aspects
of it- will work… so-called virtual design is
more real!

24. • “One of the tasks of designing is to try to
anticipate, predict and void any possible
failures” (Hubka and Eder, 1996)

25. • “The concept of failure is central to the design
process.” Petroski (1994)
• “Nothing is perfect, even the most traditional and
established ways of doing things leave something
to be desired. When a new design removes one of
the annoyances (of the old), it more likely than not
fails to address some others or adds a new one of
its own. All design involves conflicting objectives
and hence compromise, and the best designs will
always be those that come up with the best
compromise.”

26. • “I don’t have any idea what I’m going to
write until I start to write.” Peter Eisenman
quoted in Herbert (1993)

27. • “The writing or the drawing takes on a life
of its own and we are there to assist.”
Herbert (1993)

28. • “Design sketches serve as a medium through
which a designer makes visual/spatial reasoning; a
designer externalises newly formed but still vague
ideas in the form of less rigid and ambiguous
depictions on paper. By inspecting those
externalised ideas, the designer finds useful clues
to refine them, which motivates him or her to draw
again.” Suwa, M., Gero, J. S. and Purcell, T.
(1999a)

29. • “To the extent that the drawing is inexplicit
and ambiguous, it is open to multiple
interpretation, and it is exactly these
multiple representations that allow further
development of the design. When design
synthesis drawings are no longer
ambiguous, the design development stops.”
Herbert (1993)

31. • “Study drawings are not all of one kind:
they may be either more or less abstract or
they may progressively change from private
to public.” Herbert (1993)

32. • “But why is it necessary for designers to
draw at all?”
• “One thing that is clear is that sketches
enable designers to handle different levels
of abstraction simultaneously.” Cross
(1998)

33. • “In design, drawing is a kind of intelligence
amplifier, just as writing is an intelligence
amplifier for all of us when we are trying to
reason something out. Without writing, it
can be difficult to explore and resolve our
own thoughts; without drawing, it is
difficult for designers to explore and resolve
their thoughts.” Cross (1998)

34. • “One obvious reason is that the end point of
the design process usually requires a
drawing, or a set of drawings, that provide a
model of the object—the building or the
product—that is to be made by the builder
or manufacturer. That is the designer’s
goal—to provide that model.” Cross (1998)

35. • “Drawings and sketches help clarify our
visual thoughts. Finke (1993)

36. • “For the designer “the graphic world of the
sketchpad is the medium of reflection-in-
action. Here they can draw and talk their
moves in spatial-action language, leaving
traces.” Schön (1983)

37. • “Virtual worlds are contexts for
experimenting within which practitioners
can suspend or control some of the
everyday impediments to rigorous
reflection-in-action. They are representative
worlds of practice in the double sense of
‘practice’. And practice in the construction,
maintenance, and use of virtual worlds
develops the capacity for reflection-in-
action which we call artistry.” Schön (1983)
p. 162

38. Design is real

39. • The world of our everyday experience is
shaped by the practice of engineering and
technology, and the world shapes those
activities in turn.

40. • “Artefacts, even the most innovative
kind, possess evolutionary pasts.”
Dasgupta (1996)
• Phylogeny
and ontogeny

41. • “Where do designers get their ideas?” The
answer, of course, is mainly from other
architects and designers, so is it mere
casuistry to distinguish between tradition
and plagiarism?” Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
The Columbia World of Quotations (1996)

42. • “Creativity comes from the past; that is,
creative works began in continuity with the
past.” Weisberg, R. (1993)

43. • “In order to produce influential work in a
field, one may have to know what came
before.” Weisberg, R. (1993)

44. • “Design solutions in turn create new
and different [design] problems.” “The
vast majority of our everyday
environment has been designed and,
even, invented within our own
generation.” Lawson (1997)

45. • “For humans, to produce the artificial
is an absolutely natural activity”
Manzini (1990)

46. • “Design is derived from practical
experiences, extending what is possible to
what is desirable.” Nadin (1997)

47. • “Reality puts boundaries on what is needed and
what is useful. (…) You may get lots of new ideas,
but no one knows which are good and which are
bad, and you have far more ideas than you can
ever implement.” Csikszentmihalyi (1999)

48. • “Design involves the user in choices to be
made. In this way, design becomes an
indicator of the state of public intelligence,
taste and interest.”
Nadin (1997)

49. • In 1999 cars killed 880,000 persons and
injured 30 million (WHO)

50. • Very real and urgent problems addressed.

51. • These leather clogs are not objects but
ambits, places where a lifestyle and a
culture reside: “The poetry of peasant life”
(Millet).

53. • Heidegger defines a thing as a nucleus around
which many changing qualities are grouped, or a
bearer upon which the qualities rest; something
that possesses something else in itself. Now this
definition, if considered minutely, is the essence
for designers to see things not as physical objects
but as systems of 'something else', sets of
'changeable properties' that suggest far more than
the simple appearance or its momentaneous
function.

54. • For encountering things in the realm of
everyday experience, they must approach
us, affect us, obtrude and intrude upon us.
Thus occur impressions, sensations, which
occupy peculiar intermediate positions
between the things and the human beings,
between object and subject. Heidegger
(1964)

58. • “The designer is someone especially able to
observe different realities as forms of
encounter where interactions acquire some
sense.” López Quintás (1998)
• “Designerly ways of thinking” Cross (1998)
• “Learning to see architecturally” Tweed (1999)

59. Design is very much
the relation between
virtual and real.

60. What is design?

61. • “Design is a discipline that suffers the lack
of reflection. Constitutes practice without
theory, praxis without knowledge: it is
done, but no-one knows exactly what is
done.” Zimmermann (1998)

62. • “It has often been suggested that design is
as much a matter of finding problems as it is
of solving them.” Lawson, B. (1997)

63. • Invention is the discovery of a general
principle of arrangement that, in effect,
governs or defines a class of systems.
Design, in contrast, is the application of
such a principle in some given context and
results in a particular embodiment of the
principle (Pye, 1964).

64. • “We view design activity as a process of
collective elaboration consisting in ‘a
transformation of a set of specifications for
a material or symbolical device into the
description of an artefact’.” Grosjean,
Fixmer and Brassac (2000)

65. • "Non-routine design can be defined as that
class of design activity when all the
variables which define structure and
behaviour are not known in advance, nor
necessarily are all the processes needed to
produce them." P. 261 Gero in Dartnall, T.
(1994)

66. • “I shall consider designing as a
conversation with the materials of a
situation.” Schön (1983) p. 78
• "Design is often solution-led, in that early
on the designer proposes solutions in order
to better understand the problem." Candy
(1997)

67. • “There are essentially two basic approaches
to design: the artistic ideal of expressing
yourself and the engineering ideal of
solving a problem for a costumer.” Jacob
Nielsen, Designing Web Usability, Indiana:
New Riders Publishing, 1999, quoted in
Bonsiepe, G. (2000)

68. • “The function of what I call design science is to solve
problems by introducing into the environment new
artefacts, the availability of which will induce their
spontaneous employment by humans and thus,
coincidentally, cause humans to abandon their previous
problem-producing behaviours and devices.” Buckminster
Fuller

69. • “The answer is probably that we shall
never really find a single satisfactory
definition of design but that the searching is
probably much more important than the
finding.” Lawson (1997)

70. Relation virtual/real

71. Virtual as real
• “One of the curious aspects of digital
technology is the valorisation of a new
realism. From Hollywood special effects to
architectural rendering, the success of the
new technology is measured by its ability to
seamlessly render the real. Even so-called
virtual reality has not so much been used to
create alternative realities but to replicate
those already existing. Allen (1998)

73. • “A model is almost anything from a naked
blonde to a quadratic equation.” Goodman (1976)
• Simulation: a representation of reality that
is not real, i.e. is virtual.

74. • “The optical artifice (QTVR) is commonly
referred to as virtual reality, it demonstrates
our willingness to give the eyes a
monopoly.”
McCullough (1998)

75. • Sense of place

76. • “The space of the future would be both of
real and of virtual nature. Architecture will
‘take place’, in the literal sense of the word,
in both domains: in real space and virtual
space.” Virilio (1998)

77. • “Any kind of matter is about to vanish in
favour of information. To me, to disappear
does not mean to become eliminated. Just
like the Atlantic, which continues to be
there even though you can no longer feel it
as you fly over it. The same happens with
architecture: it will continue to exist, but in
the state of disappearance.” Virilio (1998)

78. • Artefacts are not interesting in their atoms
but in the experiences they enable and
promote.

79. Virtual and real
• Atoms/bits difference is nearly irrelevant
since design is concerned with the
interaction between user and artefact.

80. Design with computers

81. • “In current 3D CAD-programs, neither of
the components of the creative process,
combining and restructuring, appears to be
supported very well. Current 3D CAD-
programs do not seem appropriate for
supporting the creative process in the
conceptual phase of design, where idea-
sketches are usually made.” Verstijnen and
Hennessey (1998)

82. • “The internal representations of most CAD
programs are not amenable to abstraction or
ambiguity.” Gross, M. (1996)
• “Compared with the way we draw, such
systems are about as helpful as a chisel, a
hammer and a tablet of stone.” Lawson, B.
(1997)

83. New media and design
• “Study drawings are not neutral; they are
not transparent representations of a separate
objective reality conceived beforehand by
the designer. On the contrary, they are an
imposed order that introduces substantial
new issues into the design task –issues that
have significant effects. (…) The designer
cannot choose to work in such a way that
media have no effect.” Herbert (1993)

84. • “No medium is passive. In each medium,
previous experiences and patterns of
interaction are accumulated.” Nadin (1997)

85. • “Architectural designers in the late
twentieth century continue to use study
drawings much as architects did in the
fifteenth.” Herbert (1993)
• “Apparently the role of media in design is
not fixed; if it has changed before, it may
change again.” Herbert (1993)

86. • “The argument that graphic media are active
participants in design thinking is a
challenge to designers –a challenge to
regard study media as a creative resource.”
Herbert (1993)

87. Design for computers
(As opp to design for concrete, for wood, etc)

88. Design for computers

89. Integral design discipline
• Common approach to human needs and
experiences.
• “Looking at the numerous, sometimes conflicting,
interpretations of design and its difference to
engineering and sciences, we have the concern for
the user, and aesthetic quality. It is the focus on
the user and her/his concerns from an integrative
perspective that characterizes the design
approach.” Bonsiepe, G. (2000)

90. Design and other disciplines
• “We might describe the scientists as having
a problem-focused strategy and the
architects as having a solution-focused
strategy.” Lawson, B. (1997)

91. • “A good scientist is a person with original
ideas. A good engineer is a person who
makes a design that works with as few
original ideas as possible. There are no
prima donnas in engineering.” Freeman
Dyson (b. 1923) The Columbia World of
Quotations (1996)

92. Good design?

94. Reply and delete

100. Dinner/party : flash/html

104. Function-Behaviour-Structure

105. Good design?
• “Quality and creativity in design are by no
means synonymous. (…) The Eames chair,
Sottsass typewriter and Starck toothbrush
have not necessarily been proven to be of a
superior quality to others of the same
category, and their claim to fame rests
solely on the alleged creative touch of their
designers.”

106. • “Few of us will ever agree entirely about
just how good one piece of design is.”
Lawson, B. (1997)

107. • “Perhaps believing in good design is like
believing in God, it makes you an optimist.”
Terence, Sir Conran (b. 1931), The
Columbia World of Quotations (1996)

108. • “In the future you won’t buy artists’ works,
you’ll buy software that makes original
pieces of ‘their’ works, or that recreates
their way of looking at things.” Brian Eno
quoted in McCullough (1998)
• Obsolescence of hardware/software
distinction.

109. • Situations are real with real consequences.
• Design artefacts of all sorts (‘virtual’ and
‘real’) mediate the experience of humans in
their world, and shape their situations.

110. Disclaimer
• “Designers are like this book, they are full
of contradictions.” Lawson, B. (1997)

111. References
• http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~rsos7705
Thank you