People in Design 1.0 - Orthographics

John King, Jen Mahoney, Chip Sullivan

A couple weeks ago I was on a panel discussing people in architecture at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. It comes up again and again in design presentation classes. To the adult student who gave up on drawing around age eight, getting comfy with perspective sketching is a challenge; add figures to the mix and it's double jeopardy! Yet despite the predominance of plans in design development, instruction for drawing our fellow humans in plan is rare! We draw 'em like we see 'em. In elevation.  Some figure-drawing guidelines over the ages are below. What's not specified here is how they relate to one another, or to whatever the visual field represents.

Proportioning parts of the body to the whole are a physiological constant. Size of figures in relation to one another changes with the beliefs of the culture that depicts them. Gods big; slaves small, etc.

Above it all 5.0 What are those tiny things?

Detail, plan view of San Francisco Ferry Building

Figures in plan may cause the viewer some confusion before the scale effect sets in. We don't often perceive our fellow humans from above. To get a sense of scale, we'd do better to gauge the size of this place using what seem to be tables and chairs. Cluster them at entries, around new information in plan or at featured design elements. Evenly spaced they may seem like texture. In the plan below, word labels and figures help tell the story of the activities in the space. Where the figures overlap shapes, the viewer also gauges heights of objects overlapped by figures.

Proposed Dining Commons for Edible Schoolyard Project

Above it all 4.0 Pairing it down

Let's get down to the workhorse signifier in a plan: lines.

1. Most abstractly, line in a plan makes a feature distinction between one side and the other, the way in linguistics, a single audio shift (vocalization) makes the difference between pear and bear. 

The bottom distinctive pair is crucial info for an Embarcadero-Telegraph Hill trip.

2. Lines on a plan describe boundaries that will mediate movement and transactions. Like a sieve, a stairway, or a speed-bump, those boundaries affect access to visual, acoustic and spatial events. The flow and behavior of weapons, vehicles, valuables, germs, and creatures, including people are mediated. Line thickness and continuity convey meaning, too. 
The nature of the boundary remains ambiguous until third-dimension data is supplied, usually via elevation, section, annotation or a perspective drawing. 

Student work addressing access & transaction boundaries at a grocery store.

For environmental design, considering plans through these abstract lenses helps to focus on problem-solving without being distracted by particular products or finishes. Next post tries out the most common connector an image makes between viewer and design.

Above it all 3.0 Anonymity and Superiority

Screen shot of ©Google Maps view of SF. Scale bar on lower RH side. 

The viewer of a photo is automatically placed in the position of the camera; however, an aerial photo is an extreme variety. It foreshortens the height dimension so much that the image resembles a plan. Viewers feel above it all without feeling specifically located, similar to the anonymity 2D plans provide. Like plans, aerial photos also require additional help to effectively communicate spatial relations. Tourists who plan an easy walk from Levi's Plaza west to Coit Tower, will get a message from their bodies about what data is missing on the satellite pic above! 
Anonymity, disengagement and superiority: some of the emotional color an aerial shot or a plan provides.

West to Coit Tower from Levis Plaza

Greenwich steps looking down & east

Above it all 2.0 Can you relate?

                         photo courtesy Belle Marko

How about photos, then? Do photos work for maps? For communication of design ideas, sharing a photo does not guarantee mutual understanding of the subject depicted. Depending on the desired outcome, one may have to add –or subtract– elements to make a story clearer to an intended audience. This photo elicits my awe and admiration for the engineering of the Golden Gate Bridge. It may not engage the Egyptian brick-maker from the last post. He may have never seen a sea from on high, nor would he know that each of those light blobs can carry a family of six. What would he make of this image? If one could reach across a 3500-year culture gap, what addition to this image would tell the brick-maker what's going on in this photo? 

We think of photos as carrying real information, because a camera reports everything in its field of view. Sometimes that's no help. The same view in fog, at dawn, or at high noon looks very different. A photo is merely a flat extraction of 3D data, whether taken from a satellite, a roaming van, or the end of a laparoscope. It's an abstract field of texture and color, unless it indicates scale or depicts a familiar item that gives the viewer a sense of his or her size in relation to the scene. 

I'm glad my GPS doesn't send me "real" aerial photos for navigation! It reduces visual data to fewer colors, some arrows and scale indicators, and I can quickly choose a path.  

Above it all 1.0 Missing info

incised clay fragment 13-14c BCE map of Nippur (in Iraq)

Maps (plans) show how one piece of real estate is related to another. They typically show 2 dimensions. This worked to describe space for thousands of years. It's fun to look for ways image-makers have tried to weave in a third dimensional matrix into a plan view: height, the future, the afterlife, kinship or social hierarchy. We invented all kinds of systems for representing a 3rd dimension! Where we can't know the hierarchy between objects in images from distant times or unfamiliar cultures, we can only speculate why an image was created. Below is an early representation of all 3 dimensions around a body of water. 

The Garden, fresco from Nebamun tomb, originally in Thebes, Egypt, now in the British Museum, London, U.K. Painting on plaster, 72 x 62 cm.

In a similar image-type, we read depth cues in the overlap between human figures, shore, water, and pottery for a short visual narrative about extracting something from the pond. See below.

Nina de Garis Davies' reproduction of Rehkmire Tomb image,1500-1200 BCE

Fitting in

Survival, the other end of the spectrum from Creativity, has a relationship with Resilience that compromises the body.

In my work drawing concepts for teams at different companies, I've had the opportunity to observe and participate in creative dynamics. Drawing pictures is nice. The interpersonal stuff makes it very exciting. Even if a launch fails, that hive energy begets creative, proactive attitudes. Over the years, teams spin off smaller units. Some go way outside the mothership. Resiliency is good for the body and for business. 

Sometimes, due to pressure from non-creative partners or free-floating fear, teams stop being proactive. Maybe a deep yearning for predictability, rooted in survival is speaking. A few seasons of success lend the impression that any project can be planned and executed in Excel-type fashion. That works when the spreadsheet has columns named re-frame and reality check; and cells named unknown and epiphany! 
Our new holy grail is the program that tidily snaps those categories on a spreadsheet. One of Resiliency’s tight friends is Creativity; both resist the matrix.