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Design Notes 01: Architecture and Vision

Published
Kenta Toshikura

This note brings together books and experiences that have shaped how I think about and see design. I encountered these books as a student, so both they and my memories of them go back some time, but their underlying ideas have not faded and remain rooted in me. Rather than arranging design books in sequence, I will consider what each one addresses and how it continues to inform my judgment today.

  • ※ This article is an AI translation of the Japanese original.

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

James J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception considers seeing not only in terms of the eyes and brain but through the relationship between the body and the environment. Affordance is a familiar concept in design, but what stayed with me most strongly were his ideas about texture, depth, and the ambient optic array.

The ambient optic array is the structure of light reflected from the environment and surrounding the observer. The light reaching the eye is not a collection of disconnected stimuli. It has already been organized by walls, floors, the surfaces of objects, and the way they are arranged. From changes within that structure, we read the orientation and distance of surfaces and their relationship to the surrounding environment.

For example, on a surface covered with patterns of equal size, the pattern appears finer and denser as it recedes. From this change in texture, we can sense the extent and inclination of the surface. If the pattern ends at a boundary, we can also tell that one surface is hiding another. Even when the whole of every surface is not visible, depth emerges through the relationships between visible surfaces and the way they conceal one another.

When bodily movement is added, the array of light changes continuously as the viewpoint shifts. Surfaces that were hidden a moment ago appear, while others become hidden. Relationships between foreground and background that were ambiguous in a single still image become clear when we move. Seeing is not simply a matter of receiving the image before us. It is an ongoing activity of moving through an environment and finding out what is there.

Affordance, too, is treated not as a meaning attached to an object in advance but as a relationship between the environment and the body. The same step can be climbable or become an obstacle depending on the size of the body and its range of movement. What an environment makes possible cannot be determined apart from the person perceiving it.

I had thought of vision as a mechanism for receiving what was directly in front of me, so the idea that seeing included moving the body felt new. Until then, vision had seemed more immediate and matter-of-fact to me. After reading the book, it felt unexpectedly romantic. It was not so much the unseen parts themselves as how something is hidden and what appears through movement. These are also forms of information through which we understand our surroundings. Human vision and imagination do more than I had thought.

Looking at architecture, not showing everything does not necessarily reduce the amount of information. The curve of a wall or the overlap of surfaces can tell us that space continues beyond what is visible. What remains hidden can also prompt the next action.

The Visual Receptor System

The visual receptive system does not record light directly like the pixels of a camera. In the retina, the area served by a single ganglion cell is called its receptive field, and many of these cells respond strongly to differences in brightness between the center and the surrounding area. What is sent to the brain is not only the absolute amount of light but information that includes differences and boundaries.

One characteristic I pay particular attention to in my work is that vision adapts to stimuli that do not change. When a constant stimulus continues, the response of the visual system weakens. Even when we look steadily at one point, the eye is never completely still. Tiny movements keep the image moving across the retina. When an image is experimentally stabilized on the retina, what was visible gradually fades and may even disappear.

Learning how this works can make us want to introduce change into a design, but adaptation is not necessarily something to avoid. On a screen used for long periods, secondary information that remains visible can be allowed to recede into the background, while contrast or motion can be used for changes of state that should not be missed. But if change continues, we adapt to that as well, so it should occur only at the necessary moment. The mechanisms of vision do not decide the answer. They are one of the premises worth knowing when making a judgment.

Josef Albers: Despite Straight Lines

While Gibson understood seeing through the relationship between the body and the environment, Josef Albers shows, under more limited conditions, how relationships change appearance itself.

Almost everything in Josef Albers: Despite Straight Lines is made from straight lines. Although the drawings should be flat, following the lines makes three-dimensional forms appear. As we try to see which plane is in front, foreground and background reverse, and what we thought we understood as one form changes into another. Yet the lines themselves do not move. What changes is the viewer’s reading of the relationships between them.

What matters is not simply the appeal of an optical illusion. We do not take in what is before us exactly as it is. We create form and depth by connecting a number of relationships. We may see space that is not drawn in the figure, or several different spaces may emerge from the same figure. Seeing is not only receiving an object but also an act of reconstructing it.

Albers does not treat each line as an isolated element. He composes the lines so that their relationships produce multiple ways of seeing. The depth and instability that appear are not accidents left in place. They result from carefully constructing relationships between elements. Design includes not only the completed form but also what the person looking at it will read.

The discussion that began with the perception of line and depth now moves toward human action. If we translate these relationships into the use of physical objects, they lead to Donald Norman’s question of what cues to provide so that people can use something without confusion.

The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design

Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things does not locate the cause of difficulty in using an object solely in the user’s ability. Instead, it considers the cues and mappings provided by the object. In his example of light switches, placing the switches in the same arrangement as the room’s floor plan makes it immediately clear which light each switch controls. It is an exceptionally clear solution that maps a two-dimensional arrangement directly onto another.

In practice, however, we almost never encounter switches like this. The reason the system has not become widespread is probably not only cost or operation, but also that ordinary switches work well enough once people become familiar with them. Even something that is difficult to understand at first can become widely used as it grows familiar. The hamburger menu on the web is a similar example.

Whether to use a natural mapping or an already learned convention depends on how many first-time users there will be, whether something will be used repeatedly, and how serious the consequences of an error would be. When many users will be encountering it for the first time and mistakes have significant consequences, I lean toward a form whose relationships can be understood without learning. Conversely, when an operation will be repeated and its convention is already shared, a learned cue can be used to keep the screen concise.

It is also interesting that Gibson and Norman understand affordance differently. Addressing the possibilities for action that exist in the relationship between the environment and the body may sound close to designing what people perceive they can do, but the two are slightly different. Norman later called the perceptible cues that help people choose an action signifiers, clarifying their distinction from affordances.

At the same time, Emotional Design remained as something that, at first glance, seemed to conflict with The Design of Everyday Things. Norman himself does not see usability and emotion as contradictory. He considers them at three levels: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. What concerned me as I read the two books was less a theoretical contradiction than the tense question of which value to prioritize in the act of making.

It is important that something can be used correctly, but people do not choose things on correctness alone. Some situations call for clarity and efficiency. Other experiences emerge by retaining time or pauses that may appear wasteful at first. Of course, this does not mean that something should be difficult to understand, nor will that time necessarily turn into attachment in the end.

Something remains between usability and emotion that cannot be reduced to a simple principle.

Architecture

Screens and architecture engage the body differently and operate on different timescales. With a screen, we do not move the whole body as we do in architecture. Even so, scrolling and screen transitions change what is visible, so there is time before and after an action. They share questions of what to show now, how to suggest what comes next, and how to communicate a person’s current position. Nor do the ideas I encountered in books appear separately in architecture. In physical space, light and depth, bodily movement, clarity, and emotion all occur at once.

Guggenheim Museum

The Guggenheim Museum is one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s major late works. Its design began in 1943, and the museum opened sixteen years later in 1959. Wright had died six months earlier at the age of ninety-one. The spiral ramp surrounding its central atrium differed greatly from conventional museums and prompted debate over whether the architecture would draw more attention than the works on display.

I saw the Guggenheim Museum in person more than ten years ago. At the time, my purpose was to see the architecture rather than the exhibition.

When I entered, I could not move from where I stood for a while. I remember the light reflecting from the walls and floor and leaving the whole space softly, diffusely bright. From there, I naturally began to walk along the distinctive spiral. The route must actually be quite long, but it did not feel long. Had the same distance extended in a straight line, I might have found it difficult halfway through.

What interested me was the way the wall curved. Without revealing too much of what lay ahead, it drew me little by little around the bend. At the same time, the continually changing height let me know how far I had progressed. It concealed what would come next while showing my progress within the whole. I think the presence of those two conditions at once kept the long route from feeling long.

Architecture that directs visitors to walk deserves discussion. It felt natural to my body, but the same route will not work in the same way for everyone. The question of how to preserve the experience created by walking while allowing people with different physical conditions to experience the continuity of the space must also be considered within the same architecture.

Even so, when I look back on my own experience, the ramp remains with me not as mere movement but as a span of time like a lingering resonance or pause.

Usability and efficiency are relatively easy measures to grasp when thinking about design, but shortening the distance to a destination is not always better. At the Guggenheim Museum, the time spent walking toward a destination remained as an experience in itself. It felt as though the architecture was completed by including the time spent walking.

Archigram

Archigram was a group that emerged from a self-published architectural magazine begun in London in 1961. Against a background of space exploration, information technology, and consumer society, its members used magazines and drawings to envision architecture that could accommodate movement, exchange, and renewal. Many of their proposals were never realized as buildings, but they had a major influence on later architecture. In 2002, Archigram received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal.

If the Guggenheim Museum incorporates the time spent moving into its architecture, Archigram questions the assumption that architecture must be a fixed building at all. The Japanese volume Archigram, published by Kajima Institute Publishing, includes chapters such as “Expendability and the Consumer,” “Plug-in,” “Capsule,” and “Control and Choice.” A perspective open to exchange, movement, and choice runs throughout the book.

In Plug-in City, units such as housing and shops are inserted into an urban infrastructure, and older parts are replaced. In Walking City, enormous units containing the functions of a city move themselves and connect wherever they are needed. Replacing parts of a building and moving the city itself differ in scale, but neither assumes a fixed, completed form.

Michael Webb’s Cushicle and Suitaloon can be read as bringing this question down to the scale of a single body. The 1966 Cushicle is a device that allows a person to carry the environment needed for living on their back and deploy an inflatable membrane wherever it is needed. Rather than placing the body inside a room, it expands a portable environment around the body. In Suitaloon, the suit itself becomes the smallest possible house. By connecting to an outer membrane or another person’s suit, an environment for one person becomes a place for two or an even larger space.

When I learned about these projects, I wondered whether breaking architecture down to its smallest unit would leave only a skin protecting the body. Could that be called architecture? Conversely, if something protects the body and regulates its environment without fixed walls or a roof, is it already architecture?

Making a building smaller does not cause architecture to disappear. Instead, it is distributed between a membrane around the body and facilities and networks in distant locations. It reappears as something that establishes relationships between the body, skin, facilities, environment, and other people. What I took from Archigram was not only its futuristic forms but a perspective from which to reconsider the very scope of the word architecture.

Closing

The books and buildings discussed here do not offer answers that can be applied directly to my current work. When I consider whether to let something flow naturally or pause it, whether to reveal or conceal, and whether to allow adaptation or introduce change, spaces I once saw and words I once read return to me.

What I have mentioned here is only a small part of what has stayed with me most strongly. Even when people encounter the same books and buildings, what remains will differ from person to person. The material for thinking about design does not necessarily exist only within design. Knowledge and experience with no direct connection to it can unexpectedly connect with what is before us. I think those connections can become occasions to reconsider one thing from another angle.

References

Supplementary Materials