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.  

2 Barn or not 2 Barn

In a semi-rural setting 65 miles from San Francisco, who needs two barns? How will the new digs look from the driveway with the old barn gone? I gave the sketch app on my iPad another try. Colleague Doug Wittnebel is in love with it; for me it still feels inauthentic, and about as sensuous as scratching my ear with an oven mitt.

blowing Brunelleschi's cover

A student made an excellent observation Wednesday night. After trying to correct a freehand sketch of a scene using new-found perspective tools, she remarked that her initial sketch felt more like the space as she experienced it. The line quality in the first sketch was personal and idiosyncratic, recalling the sensitive lines she generated during blind contour exercises. The "cleaned up" drawing was more like an Etch-a-sketch image.

Anyone who has lost happiness based on a misunderstood email knows that a low-res, virtual, electronic form of communication is full of pitfalls. So much more is happening than what those few text characters convey. The same is true when describing on flat paper a design idea that's to be experienced in the 3D environment.

Linear perspective is only one means of translation, one that has been dominant for centuries. If you've done a perspective construction, you know it's nothing like sketching with a pad of paper on your lap. Much that we have assumed to be highly skilled perspective constructions may in fact have used another translation mode, one that may have seemed more technically accurate at the time. Here is David Hockney refuting the accuracy of single-camera perspective!  Here, a Japanese image provides a comprehensive spatial narrative by other means. If you want to look further, here is Hockney as Toto, pulling away the curtain that (he alleges) hid perspective's Wizard of Oz for 600 years. Consider the "rules" of perspective more as tools, or guidelines, for translating an optical experience that occurs in 3D, over time, onto a flat surface.

The means we use to come up with what "feels" faithful to a visual experience today may also carry a message about our relationship to technology at the time of translation.

master draftsman

I ran in to Ken Sekiguchi, architect, photographer and master draftsman, on Fourth Street the other day. I had the good fortune to be on collaborative teams with Ken at Hanns Kainz' office for about 10 years, on the pencil (vs. mouse) side of the digital divide. Ken's drawings are exquisite examples of hand-drafted orthographic drawings. A medium both aesthetic and practical, his drawings translated gesture, bullshit, and schematic design into something that can be priced, measured and built. Contractors who bid projects based on his drawing sets should have bid low just for the privilege of working from those documents! Instead, because the drawings communicated design so thoroughly, they bid higher since they anticipated their work would be subject to the same scrutiny. What a bind. This image will hold a place until I get my original Ken Sek scanned.

can't get started (without you)

Kitchen test
by happs
on Sketchfab

Click on the kitchen and you can rotate and zoom in on it. Sketchfab is like Pinterest for 3D modelers to share manipulable, virtual objects with anyone who has a browser. But the object still has to be modeled! How to get started? Temple Grandin makes a case for tactile involvement in design:

"One of the things I’ve noticed, been involved in my industry designing things for over 25 years. The people who are really good at drafting on the computer are the people who were good at drafting by hand. People coming in now doing computer-aided drawing are doing terrible drawings, they make lots of errors, they leave out perceptual detail, they don’t see it. The errors made in their drawings are the errors that the very worst students in my design class make; these are the students that have no visualization capability. I don’t think the mouse is hooked up to the brain like the hand is. You don’t make some of these mistakes if you actually draw the thing by hand. Let’s say for example, you’re drawing a cattle stockyard, you’ve got a whole lot of gates in it; one draftsman I saw, using computer-aided drawing, had 25-foot gates built in it. You can’t have a 25-ft. long gate; the leverage will make it come off the hinges. Now if you take a compass, you’ll see that you can’t do it. I’m seeing more and more mistakes being made in construction because it’s getting too abstract.

I visited with Irene Pepperberg, whose parrot can learn categories. To learn them, he had to manipulate the objects; looking wasn’t enough for him to understand. I can really relate to that. Touching gives an understanding you don’t get just by looking." 2000 interview with Temple Grandin in the Harvard BRAIN, bold emphasis mine. 
Drawing by hand and rough modeling with cardboard and clay are excellent ways to strengthen one's visualization capacity. 

annotation

Progress sketch of nuclear material

storage rods for Mother Jones 

illustration, ©J.F.Mahoney

A bright young electronics engineer is in town for conferences and study. He and his colleagues design and create objects that can only be seen with an electron microscope! A different kind of virtual viewing, this tiny 3-dimensionality! I asked him if he takes notes on his laptop or on paper. He said back in Japan he takes notes using a keyboard, but here in the US, he started using pencil on lined paper while he was first settling in, because his baggage was delayed. When he reviewed his handwritten notes, the thinking provoked by seeing his own handwriting felt "more creative". He decided to take notes by hand the whole summer.

beautiful book

In addition to the mysteries made visible in this Vince Collins spot, another early influence for me was exploded illustrations of mechanical parts, cars and engines. My dad worked for GM and car imagery was never far from reach. In the early part of my career, I had the pleasure losing myself in the making of these, both ruled and freehand. The best were for Austrian architect Hanns Kainz'projects.
At the AIA convention this spring, I perused a doorstop-weight tome called Architectural Geometry from Bentley Institute. It's a geeky delight, full of complex shapes reduced to their pure geometry and made 2D visible. Thanks, digital age! That really scratches an itch.

when it rains, it pours

The current batch of perspectivists at UC Extension recently reverse-engineered some photos. Reverse engineering is the process of analyzing a subject system to create representations of the system at a higher level of abstraction. A photograph is a representation of the system of perspective construction. The camera uses a station point, line of sight and picture plane; it has a field of view and focuses along a line of sight. These geometric abstractions are common to both perspective and still photography. Our perspectivists located abstract components in the photographs and roughly sketched out plan versions of the scene the camera most likely faced.
Google SketchUp simulates the same kind of reverse engineering on photos to get them to merge their represented reality into the virtual reality of SketchUp. The programmers then had to find a way to make visible the abstract components WITHIN its 3D modeling software, since the software itself, being no more like sight than photography, is a representation of the system of perspective drawing. Looks a lot like the perspectivists' work!The whole process reminds me of staring at the rainy-day illustration on the Morton Salt container. A girl was holding an umbrella and a container of Morton Salt, which had the same illustration with a smaller girl, smaller container, with yet another illustration of a girl with an umbrella and an illustrated container. Or so I imagined.

man vs. machine

The increasing speed of 3d modeling software challenged me to read plans and drill into to the heart someone's design ever faster. But a John Henry-style characterization doesn’t seem valid. Handmade alone may no longer be time-efficient, but digital alone doesn’t feel humane -- feel, not look. The richness and emotional appeal of illustrations that employ a hybrid of techniques should be an encouragement to designers as well as illustrators to employ the best of both modes. It's surprising how few people knew the blend of myth and history around John Henry, that steel-drivin' man. Just the name starts a song in my head. Here's a radio clip on John Henry from Studio 360.

what's wrong with this picture?

At lunch the other day, an urban developer pondered, "What's with this designing on computer? I call our architect to ask what his thinking is on the changes we're making. He sends me a computer drawing. All I want to see is a sketch, a drawing of the facade! We're not getting anywhere."
What's wrong with this picture? They both want to move the design along. The developer wants feedback on how a recent discussion is playing out in the design. The architect is taking his client's commentary and implementing it in the building system. Yet the drawing-as-reply did not scratch the question's itch.

Is this a case of media preference, like preferring handwritten notes to typed? Kindle to hardcover? But isn't more information carried by handwriting than typing?Drawings in this post are random examples and bear no relation to the architect or developer in this narrative.

the interview process

Before we were spoiled by digital 3d modeling,
a perspectivist had to be judicious about choosing views.
If a proposed view was rejected, reconstruction could take hours! To avoid redraws, I developed two steps: the interview and view selection. Despite a technological revolution, this prelude remains crucial to creating useful presentation tools for my clients. It's still time-efficient to avoid redraws, but the unintended benefit of these steps is an awareness of the viewing context.

It's short-sighted to ignore the intended audience of an illustration. A concept illustration aims for a particular business outcome. I make every effort to interview the person who will be showing the drawing, the person "taking the heat" -- who is not always the designer. I question aspects of the design that will inform the illustration: should it reflect the visitor experience, the owner experience, the tenant experience, the customer experience, etc? What are the speakers' goals for the presentation? Are there any discussions we don't want to trigger?
What kind of light will best reinforce the presenter's message? What acoustic qualities of the space can be disclosed with visual cues? Who'd be in this space and how are they using it? The answers are not always what's assumed at first; this process examines the designer's objectives relative to those of the presenter.

A computer model does not perform this service.

As computer-generated perspectives became widely available in the 90s, I expected requests for hand-drawn renderings to disappear. Instead, a steady stream of commissions began: to re-create digital presentations that failed! Like structural engineers who visit earthquake sites or roofs collapsed by snow, asking why failure occurred can be very enlightening. On digital re-do projects, the interview process often turns up answers.

black holes

I had been working with a retail client on look-and-feel, sketching different phases of the retail experience with scenes unique to the new flagship store in Manhattan. The store design crew sent numerous product pics and architectural files to a 3d modeler, who created an animated fly-through for concept presentation to the company's CEO. Except for the fixture design, the layout and most of the interior details were complete. Their boss found the video stiff and unfriendly. Photos of product had been stretched like silly putty around shapes that didn't match the products' proportions. Product was sparsely distributed and -- nightmare to any retailer -- nobody was in the store! Perhaps most painful for the design crew (apart from the uncannily familiar soundtrack) was how details that had not been fully worked out appeared: black polygons! These virtual voids, stole a show that could have been about how well the space was working. The concept was presented again, using quick sketches, and it moved along, approved. Later, a technique was developed to embed the brand's proprietary video ads and music into online sketch presentations.

gimme scale

Most architects and planners now have their designs on a computer instead of paper, and an information void has opened. When it's time to share the design, we often rely on PDF format. Unfortunately, the scale of an orthographic drawing is not automatically translated to the PDF. Items that were grouped in CAD software no longer self-segregate in the PDF.

When a model shot is sent in PDF or JPG format, the situation becomes even worse for determining the actual measure of lines or objects. Although the CAD user-designer is one click away from measurements and attributes, the recipient of the PDF can only guess!

A design team, working from files shared on their server, has access to all the project information; members can check details not yet generated as a document page. Outside consultants must rely on PDF files. The designers cannot assume their consultants have updated project information in a source file as they do. Best practice: Gimme scale.
Leave a scale indicator or a literal dimension (55") on the image file that's enlarge/reduce-proof, or back up a PDF with a DWG file, which DOES contain scale info. A PDF update can be sent in moments, but a faulty dimension can lead to a chain of errors that take time and money to rewind. Alternatively, upload entire files for sharing with external consultants and notify when updating.

digital vs. manual

Why do modeling programmers strive to have their machine make itself invisible? Computer modeling is approximating the look of a hand drawing to the extent that software decides how to threshold a CG "drawn" line so it is more pleasing, more appealing, more natural and looks "better".

I appreciate the different atmospheres between CG designers modeling a 3d volume and perspectivists illustrating a 3d volume from a plan. Each struggles to "lock in" to the space, but making a CAD model seems like typing while the pencil drawing, although rigidly procedural, retains that sensual friction between the medium and the paper as the mind's eye follows a virtual fold.
Very nifty that a perspective view residing in modeling software can report back the measure of the virtual volumes. Once extracted as a 2d file, it's as mute on that topic as the manual drawing.