Mindshapes and Handscapes, #2.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. Gestures Towards the Subject of Design

3. Gestures as Agents of Change: Four Remarks

4. From Landscape to Handscape

5. Discussion: Mimetic Awareness and Meaning

6. Conclusion

The essay that follows will be published in four installments; this installment, the second, contains sections 2 and 3.

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of the essay, including the REFERENCES, by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.


2. Gestures Towards the Subject of Design

Over the past few decades, there has been a tendency in design literature to locate the locus of meaning-making in the objects or artefacts that emerge during such processes. Examples include the use of visual and/or spatial representations as spaces one could imaginatively inhabit (Zumthor, 2014); the role of creating variations and differentially exploring possibilities (Rittel, 2014; Rheinberger, 2008); the manner in which knowledge is embodied in artefacts (Ballestrem & Gasperoni, 2023); and the role that a certain “fuzziness” or “openness” plays in conceiving objects.

In the “object-focused” line of thinking, the artefact is treated as a physical focal point that directs, influences and aids decision-taking. When Donald Schön opened up the debate towards the social dimension surrounding artefacts, the focal point of the “conversation with the situation” was still the architectural sketch (Schön, 1983, 1992).  More recent notions, for instance “epistemic dissonance” (Farias, 2013) still utilize a similar approach: Meanings are held to be “read into” artefacts, and so it is the act of “beholding” that drives the process of designing and deciding.

This line of thinking leads into two dead ends simultaneously:

First, it unwittingly accepts so-called “ocularcentrism,” the predominantly Western notion whereby visual perception in the form of the glance (or the Platonic eidos, perhaps) is taken as the pinnacle of knowledge, and consequently techniques of “making visible” or “making explicit” assume center stage (Pallasmaa, 2012: pp. 18–22).

Second, in focusing on objects, there is a tendency to reconstruct the processes of reasoning that occurred when they were created. However, this has the—often unintended—consequence that any form of meaning-making is retrospectively reduced to deliberative reasoning or to the practice of logic more generally at the expense of lived, embodied experience.

The idea that understanding resides just in grasping theoretical concepts, or that the center of cognition merely resides in the head or brain, guided by logic, exemplifies the intellectualism and associated conceptualism inherited from the Enlightenment. Subsequently, these ideas found their way in the works from the first generation of researchers that laid the foundations for the post-World War Two developments in design theory (see, e.g., Asimow, 1962; Eastman, 1969; Simon, 1996). By and large, the logic-centered approach discounted the lived and experienced body, its mnemonic capacities, its haptic operation, its gestural capacities, and its proprioceptive, situated, oriented being in favor of abstract conceptualizing.

Given its emphasis on logic and conceptualism, the object-focused line of thinking owes a certain debt to philosophy of language and linguistic notions of meaning-making that were prevalent in architectural theory during the 1970s and 1980s: like a text, an artefact was held to be read or interpreted, and so, a variety of overlapping meanings emerge and enrich the artefact (Pirolli, 1992; Peréz-Goméz, 2007; Eisenmann, 1995; Knorr-Cetina, 2006; Rheinberger, 2005). We can easily detect the influence of notions like Derridean différance or hermeneutic theory in this line of thought. The underlying idea that meaning emerges through an ever-shifting play of interpretations has claimed a prominent place in the pantheon of design theory.

The recent move to regard architectural sketches as traces that can be read or interpreted afterwards places the emphasis mostly on the object or its production process (Krämer et al., 2016; Krämer, 2015, 2016). This direction of thought is clearly indebted to the idea that language-use is inherently performative. Likewise, it is also preoccupied with objects. But would it not be prudent to consider the “subject of design” as well? Every object has a subject, after all, even if we would like to integrate their relationship as much as possible.

In the next section, I introduce my overall argument by making four remarks, in order to provide a theoretical foundation for thinking about the links between gesture and meaning. In the fourth section, I introduce a case study in landscape architecture in which gestures played an important role in creating mimetic awareness. And in the fifth and concluding section, all the thematic lines are drawn together in a concise reflection.

3. Gestures as Agents of Change: Four Remarks

Drawing on the perspectives of (i) embodied cognition, (ii) architectural phenomenology, and (iii) gesture theory, I propose to shift the perspective temporarily away from the object-focused thinking. I do not imply that the object-focused perspective is somehow superfluous or useless. Instead, I intend to invoke a “subject-focused approach” in order to supplement it. Since we fully engage our biological, living bodies while designing, especially when sketching by hand and/or building models or prototypes, a significant part of the meaning-making process involves our embodied cognition, in particular our capability to use our hands in gesturing. Together, these gestures form a “handscape”: a bodily anchored complex of affordances, understandings, and evocations broadly similar to what Marco Frascari has called “a genetic analysis which forms a continuation of the architectural imaginative act.” (Frascari, 2009: 204).

The turn towards embodied cognition was largely, although not exclusively, initiated by Varela and Maturana (Varela & Maturana, 1980; Varela, Rosch, & Thompson, 1991/2016; Gallagher 2005; Thompson, 2007; Hanna & Maiese, 2009;) and has been steadily developing ever since. Closely related to Gibson’s ecological psychology (Gibson, 1966), it frames cognition as a fully embodied capacity, locating the mind not just in the head or brain, but in a network of sensory capacities, including the capacity to sense moods and atmospheres, pick up on perceptual clues, and to cognize through gesturing. Likewise, it was cemented in architectural theory due to the pioneering work of Pallasmaa (Pallasmaa, 2009, 2011) and Zumthor (Zumthor, 2014), thereby acquiring prominence as the “phenomenological approach” (see, e.g., Mallgrave & Goodman 2011: 201–214). And while we often – out of habit – speak about body and mind, we could equally well emphasize that we in fact are a bodymind—an integrated, organic unity, capable of intentional action (Kasulis, 2018).

With this in mind, we shift attention from the “object of design” to the “subject of design” (Carbon, 2016) to emphasize different aspects of what transpires when meaning is created through designing. In line with this intention, I suggest that the gestures involved in drawing may be read as epistemic operations all of their own, in the sense that they deepen understanding through gestural enactment. This enactment changes the designer in the process.

First, we must liberate ourselves from the assumption that gestures are mere embellishments of speech acts. Mental processes are externalized by two distinct modes of expression: speech and gesture. Gestures are distinct from speech, but they form an integral part of language (McNeil, 2005: p. 13). Because gestures are performed in a three-dimensional space, they are naturally closely allied to imagery. For instance, we may assert that “we would like to follow the natural contours of the slope in laying out the sidewalk,” while tracing this spatial connection and slope angle with our hands, pulling it from the realm of verbally expressed concept into the realm of spatial orientation.

Second, gestures change the person making them. We touch the world, but our understanding of it is mediated and negotiated through words and gestures, utilizing them as probes or instruments (Flusser, 1994: pp. 49–52). They literally “in-form” the world. Flusser plays on the terms “inform” and “in-form”, emphasizing that our understanding of the world is action-oriented, haptic, and dialectical (Flusser, 1994: p. 50). Hands in-form the world between them and shape our image of the world accordingly.

Flusser echoes the Kantian insight that: “[one] orients [one]self geographically only through a subjective ground of differentiation” (Kant, 2001: p. 9). We can here plausibly exchange “geographically” for “spatially.” The very subjective ground of understanding is constituted by our bodies, through which we gesture, touch, and act on possibilities. Moreover, every act of thinking-through-making shapes thought-patterns and the foundational images and ideas that direct and inflect our thinking. These foundational images influence our thinking, and they change and develop over time, leading to new (thought)-habits, preferences, and values (Hanna & Paans, 2021). Through practices of making, one can actively prime the mind to regard certain images or ideas as rich in meanings, allowing designers to gradually explore their own thinking. As Pallasmaa worked out in his study on the “thinking hand,” gestures enable us to “fuse” to some degree with the subject matter that we investigate through tactile and haptic qualities (Pallasmaa, 2009).

The gestures in architectural designing are invented gestures (Kang and Tversky 2016). They belong not just to the category of movements that speakers use to communicate thoughts. Instead, they are deliberately invented for the purpose of working on a specific idea. They are unique, responsive and context-sensitive.

Such invented gestures indicate a “deep understanding”: they are unique creations by individuals, used in the course of exploring and probing the space of possibilities. This is especially important because (landscape) designers deal often with dynamic systems, such as erosion pattern, agricultural cycles, water runoff, and developing settlement patterns. Gestures that “explain” or “highlight” how dynamic systems function over time and in conjunction exert important cognitive effects. One effect is that a person working gesturally with a dynamic system (say, in sketching its structure) develops the skill to explain the fundamental features to him or herself or to other parties (Kang & Tversky, 2016).

There is an intimate link between gesturing, language (see, e.g., Harrison, 2018) and procedural memory: that is, knowledge on how to perform certain actions (see, e.g., Klooster et al., 2016). Patients with impaired procedural memory experienced problems in learning from watching gestures or their own gestures, suggesting that “knowing-how” is activated and directed through bodily movement. Literally, to understand through the body, one must move:

[The] spatial reality [of imaginative patterns] is such that they cannot be perceived. The patterns emerge in the form of imagined trajectories, moving lines of force, that a moving body draws in the process of moving, as when a dancer runs across stage, jumps in the air, and in landing, turns upstage and moves in a series of spirals downstage—or more simply, when we ourselves, in walking, turn a corner and proceed on our way down the different street. (Sheets-Johnston, 2013: 24)

To understand a spatial reality deeply, it must be actively created through lines of force—embodied projections in a three-dimensional space. The body draws the line through gesture and creates its own space, delineating and orienting itself in the world.

Third, resulting from the double tension between speech and gesture or word and image, a “growth point” emerges:

A growth point [GP] … is a minimal unit of dialectic in which imagery and linguistic content are combined. A GP contains opposite semiotic modes of meaning capture—instantaneous, global, nonhierarchical imagery with temporally sequential, segmented, and hierarchical language. The GP is a unit with demonstrable self-binding power (attempts to disrupt it, for example, with delayed auditory feedback do not succeed), and the opposition of semiotic modes within it fuels the dialectic. (McNeil, 2005: p. 18)

Oppositions, tensions, fuzziness, sketchy lines, etc., invite a kind of playful speculation that shapes subject as much as object. Gesturing as sketching is not just embellishment, but a continuous “update of a speaker’s cognitive state of being” (McNeil, 2005: p. 19) As Marco Frascari has argued in the context of architectural creation, the drawn line is the materialization of a sequence of cognitive states that shape thoughts and thinking habits alike (Frascari, 2009). In tracing an intricate or dynamic line, the gesture in its entirety is felt as a sequence of varying cognitive states, a kind of free hypothesizing, a playful, yet directed and inquisitive “what if?” question (Cocker, 2013).

Fourth, all this confirms a further finding from cognitive science: representations of objects are built out of systems of activations. During gesturing, the body actually creates and refers to perceptual symbol systems (PSS). Put concisely, PSS are layered neural traces that contain some of the motor information of the gesture that was being made in the attempt of working a thought or idea out (Goldin-Meadow, 2010: p. 665).

Sketching is a means by which thought is oriented towards an idea through gesturing and tracing. As such, it leaves neural traces (PSS) in the brain, opening a gestural connection to conceive something not (yet) imagined, but that operates via a non-intellectual pathway. It allows one to treat lines as if they were processes instead of static depictions or pieces in a logical puzzle. This brings an important cognitive change about: a re-ordering of one’s “affective frame” (Hanna & Maiese, 2009: pp. 202, 230-237), or the way in which someone relegates certain visual aspects to the cognitive periphery while pulling others towards the center of cognition. This associative ordering is not random: It is importantly influenced by bodily states, including memories, feelings, emotions and affects. Literally, gestures change what we perceive and what we deem important or merely secondary. Even more poignantly, tool-use in general, including sketching, changes the conception of the body image, thereby altering one’s own view of what one is bodily capable of (Martel et al., 2016).


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