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4.273 Fall 02 Introduction to Design Inquiry – Professor William Porter List of Assignments 4.273 Introduction to Design Inquiry Assignment 1: An Object Teams of 3 or 4 Please! This assignment initiates our quest to understand how we engage worlds through objects and how we engage objects through worlds. We'd like you to find an object to reflect upon. It can be something apparently ordinary, or something obviously designed. It should be interesting in its own right, but it should also reveal aspects of something else perceived or imagined. Please come prepared to discuss the object both in terms of its intrinsic qualities and in terms of the qualities that enable it to indicate or to mean something beyond itself. We would suggest that each team member record his/her own evolving understanding of the object and then share those with the other team members. Please keep track of the differences in understanding among the team members and how and to what extent a shared understanding emerged. And write /draw / make an essay / drawing / object that can be placed in our web-based classroom, which expresses your collective understanding of the object you found and something of the process by which that understanding was achieved. Please bring the object (the original and the ones you made) with you to class. 4.273 Introduction to Design Inquiry Assignment 2: The Infinite Corridor This assignment reflects one of the central concerns of this course: how can one be confident that ones own knowledge is true of and in the world outside oneself? Conversely, how can one learn confidently about the world? Which is the more productive view: that knowledge of the world is contained in the world, or that it is triggered in our mind by it: objectively true, or a construction that we make? This assignment also contains "intermediate objects," the essays through which you will shape a view of the world and your own essays that will convey that view. What are the properties and the content of the assigned essays that enable you to form your views? And what has been critical from your own experience? Assignment-Part I: 1. Describe the Infinite Corridor here at MIT. What do you see? What is going on? Keep track of the questions you pose for yourself. Put this aside. What are the elements and the relations that are important in each of the descriptions? What are the similarities and differences? Try to address some of the questions posed above. Choose the medium you feel is most appropriate. You should assume that you will have 5 minutes to present it. Tell us about what you will need for your presentation. Assignment-Part II: Choose two of the essays in the readings below, and write a one or two page essay (with illustrations if you like) of how that author -- as seen through that essay --would have written about the Infinite Corridor. 1. What would they see? What is going on? Keep track of the questions you pose for yourself as you stand in the shoes of the author. 2. Write as if you were the author and construct a narrative in their voice that they might have written about it. Try to become completely absorbed in their world and in their manner of speaking. A fragment ofan essay for each, say 150-200 words would be plenty. In the class discussion we shall compare and contrast how the environment might be changed to satisfy each author’s apparent needs, to meet their implied standards of excellence, and to give them pleasure. Readings: Lyford's The Airtight Cage; Jacobs's Life and Death of Great American Cities; Durrell's essay on Montevideo in the Spirit of Place, Mitchell's Bit Cities (any part) 4.273 Introduction to Design Inquiry Assignment 3: Replication Group Work This exercise of "replication" has to do with "making" as a means of "reading" things. It is an attempt to understand through an exercise in creating plausible histories of how the artifact might have come into being. It has the benefit of re-invention where the invention is known. But the force of the artifact, its rationale, its raison d’etre, can be understood through this device of reconstruction in ways that may otherwise be inaccessible. Through replication we may better be able to understand not only the characteristics of the thing, but the world within which it was conceived and intended to function. Please refer to "On Making Things" In this assignment, we are asking you to find a designed object of any size that you will replicate. By "replication" we mean imagining a constructive design-like process from which the chosen object could emerge. In the article, "Notes on the inner logic of designing: Two thought-experiments," and read in particular the first of the two, the Copley Square design. In this article designing can be viewed as resulting from a dialog between the designer's reading of a particular site and the architectonic ideas evoked in him/her by that reading. This does not pretend to be a full version of what design is, but it is a simplification that permits a moderately clear exercise to be constructed. You might think of the Copley Square exercise as operating within a "compositional" frame of reference where the references to the local situation and to the experimenter's storehouse of images are limited largely to elements of composition. Other frames of reference might be more productive in different situations, as for example, a metaphor that would allow the designer to see a situation as something else, and, therefore, to suggests aspects and characteristics not present in the original situation. Arguably the compositional frame of reference constituted a large part of the "world" of these designers. In your assignment you should choose the frame of reference (imagine the "world") you believe will best fit your selected object. The object may be a building, a place or any designed artifact. Does it suggest an original or primitive object from which it was somehow derived? What sorts of uses does it engender, and how does it do that? Can you describe your direct tactile experience of the object? Are there related experiences in your past? What can you draw from your storehouse of images and imagery that relates to it? Is there a process of discovery associated with the object and, if so, what are the events along that path of discovery? Can you clarify the underlying rules that seem to govern its design and production? How does the history of the object


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