Mindshapes and Handscapes, #4.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

2. Gestures Towards the Subject of Design

3. Gestures as Agents of Change: Four Remarks

5. Discussion: Mimetic Awareness and Meaning

6. Conclusion

The essay that follows has been published in four installments; this installment, the fourth, contains sections 5 and 6, and also the list of REFERENCES.

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.

5. Discussion: Mimetic Awareness and Meaning

The deep connections that shape the landscape were made gradually tangible by drawing multiple sketches in which we attempted to superimpose all layers. To create an image that is understandable, a lot of fine-turned drawing was required. No sweeping gestures, but instead a careful overlapping of layers, was needed in order to ensure that every element was readable as part of a larger, integral story. The gestural approach made it far easier to devise strategies that interacted with the features we had mapped out before. We easily built on the connections that we identified earlier, but now with an eye to solve recurrent problems like loss of biodiversity, drought, disappearance of small landscape elements or messy built-up village edges.

Gestures make it easier to ingrain knowledge about the interconnections that constitute landscapes. To our surprise, we found we had them cognitively “ready” when thinking about solutions to the systemic problems. Tracing out connections by hand stores the acquired information in the body, and so it becomes readily accessible while sketching. We customarily think of information as something to be obtained by viewing or reading, while we think of a skill as something to be acquired by practicing. Some information, however, is acquired only by doing.

I would suggest that gestural involvement in architectural design creates a mimetic awareness. It has been argued that architectural drawings are non-mimetic (Emmon, 2019: p. 192). That is, they are not aiming at the faithful visual reproduction of an object. However, in this case, mimetic quality played an indispensable role. Like the invented gesture, tracings and orderings resulted in a deep familiarization with the subject matter. Reproducing a pattern or landscape feature stimulates a thought process about the logic of what is gesturally experienced. Why are the twists and turns in the road this way rather than that? Why are these estates located here instead of there? This information is uncovered once one reconstructs these features with a certain mimetic acumen (fig. 5), as in this manner, anomalies and remarkable features quickly stand out, as the underlying structure discloses itself (Paans, 2022: pp. 12–31).

Figure 5: The highlighted area shows how intricate the road network is. Its twists and turns respond closely to geographic landscape features and functional demands alike. (Author, 2021)

In a theory titled the “cognition-action transduction hypothesis,” Nathan proposed that repeated bodily actions lead to long-term, generalized learning (Nathan, 2017: p. 191). This may explain the relative cognitive ease with which we could navigate the complex of physical landscape features, issues, and solutions. The action of tracing is a bodily activity that stimulates a learning process in which spatial features are related, cohering in an increasingly meaningful whole. Meaning and comprehension emerges in a gestural process not just by receiving information, but by creating it. The handscape literally changes the mind, actively shaping its cognitive and affective pathways, and its procedural memory:

Epistemologically, hypothesizing a reciprocal action-cognition system challenges deep-seated notions that place intellectual processes atop physical actions. There is a broad, societal bias favoring explicit, verbal ways of describing and assessing knowledge. (Nathan, 2017: p. 191)

Mimetic awareness aims not at visual imitation or verbal ways of description and assessment. Instead, through gesture, one becomes acquainted with the subtleties that underlie form and function. In sketching and tracing, this information is bodily stored for easy retrieval, but equally for changing thinking habits, thereby changing the designing subject as the line unfolds.

Here we find a link to the orientation of our embodied cognition. As a bipedal species with two eyes, we perceive depth, and intuit a clear up-down orientation (see, e.g., Koffka, 1936). These physical features enable us to situate our perceptual system and proprioceptively experienced body in an organized, oriented space of cognition. We can trace out a gesture space within the limits of our bodily capabilities. A sweeping architectural gesture or delicate line is not merely drawn as a way of visually representing an idea. Instead, it is bodily acted out.

Our perceptual field is never undisturbed or homogeneous (Koffka, 1936: pp. 281–282). If we gesture by means of drawing—by carefully tracing a line, or interacting with what we have already drawn—we deliberately disturb the tranquility of the perceptual field. If we do so on purpose, we re-orient the entire field, and consequently, we literally change our outlook on the subject matter. The “growth point” emerges due to these disturbances, and exactly there, the dialectic between gesture and thought unfolds. For architectural design, the drawn lines, and therefore the gestures, conjoin into a graphesis, or generative process of visual understanding (Frascari, 2009: p. 202).

A further point in this connection concerns precision: in a landscape where nothing is coincidental, and where searching for historical clues is necessary to make any proposed change appropriate and meaningful, the crucial thing to do is to train to body to achieve a heightened, mimetic awareness for features that might elude the innocent eye. Often, these innocuous clues provide fundamental motives to propose changes.

An example in this category is the relation between the angle of the hillsides and the run-off speed of precipitation. On a steep slope, water runs off quickly, dragging fertile soil with it and causing erosion, as well as flooding down the slope. However, steep slopes are often flanked by gentle slopes. Because the water reaches a lower speed on such slopes, it takes longer to traverse them. During that time, it is possible to “trap” the water in hedges, bushes or artificial cascades. Once we realized this possibility, it became the very basis for a new spatial order, in which shallow slopes were designated as areas where to add small landscape elements and reviving traditional visual features (fig. 6).

Figure 6: Two types of parcellation and their orientation (left, below), settlement patterns and road networks (left, top) considered with the altitude in mind. In the end, we proposed a new type of parcellation derived from characteristic features in the geomorphology and existing structures (right). (Author, 2022)

This insight made it possible to project into the landscape a new set of potentials, apprehending a possible order that was immanent in it, but that could be recognized only through a careful, mimetic, and above all, gesture-based form of engagement.

Gestures, as carriers of meaning, emerge within an integral sequence of thoughts, gestures, concepts and representations that is experienced as a more-or-less continuous tapestry of meaning. Each gesture is oriented towards action and the future (Gallagher, Martínez, & Gastelum, 2017). Simultaneously, the gesture already retains contents from former experiences. Through this in-forming dialectic, meaning emerges in the present through the interplay of past and future.

The epistemic process implied here progresses via a phenomenological, lived method for meaning-making. It is an unfolding of understanding, remembering and learning through gestures. Any concepts emerging from such a practice bear little resemblance to “concepts” in the sense of systematic abstractions. Sheets-Johnstone calls them “concrete concepts” or “corporeal concepts” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2010). Gesturing activates and embodies knowledge through bodily, lived experience, shaping thoughts, thinking habits, sensibility, and consequently one’s creative space. Knowledge acquired through a gestural process possesses a phenomenological depth that far surpasses theoretical abstractions. It imbues newly acquired knowledge with a bodily, grounded, first-person aspect, thereby becoming lived meaning rather than dry fact. In this context, Haarmann has spoken of an “aesthetic epistemology”: a way of acquiring and evoking insights via an aesthetic rather than logic-based pathway (see, e.g., Haarmann, 2019; Root-Bernstein, 2002).

The design outcomes of a high level of mimetic awareness are not straightforwardly replicable across all contexts and cases, because much depends on the design skill of the individual, the changed plasticity of body, brain and mind, and the context in which they apply them. However, the efficacy of this method is generalizable as a skill. A competent piano teacher might teach all the techniques to students to foster performative excellence, but cannot expect that all students will turn into concert pianists. Yet, without providing these techniques, any chance of becoming highly skilled is forestalled from the very beginning. A similar case can be made with regard to mimetic awareness. Just like a feeling for composition, process control and aesthetic acumen, this skill exerts a diffuse, yet essential practical effect, diffusely influencing design competence for the better. This fact has three principal implications.

First, it has been established that gesturing while describing design features facilitates perspective-taking. (Mittelberg et al., 2017; Paans & Pasel, 2020). For instance, someone might—supported by gestures—describe the properties of their design to someone else, or they may describe it from a first-person perspective, or even from multiple perspectives. This way of gesturally “simulating” certain features of the design aids comprehension, as it engages with multiple embodied, perspectival and functional aspects of the design proposal. In turn, this deepened understanding changes the designing subject, as they come to grips with what their decisions entail.

Second, gesturing, like sketching, transfers mental contents (thoughts, notions, ideas, etc.) from the mental realm into the realm of semantic content. So, fluid and open ideas are (partially) materially fixed and become thereby the object of (collective) inquiry. Through such translation, implicit ideas, assumptions, or tacitly accepted notions often come to light, as well as anomalies, underlying patterns or inconsistencies. By visually and gesturally “working through” the material, the process of mimetic awareness gradually progresses, as formerly subconscious mental contents are drawn into the conscious domain, thereby fully assimilating themselves in the body’s repertoire of awareness.

Conveying the development of awareness presents challenges, but also inviting opportunities for engaging in auto-ethnography, or first-person reporting of design experiences (see, e.g., Schouwenberg & Kaethler, 2021). By describing, analyzing, and carefully reflecting on how the interplay of gesture, thought, and drawing aids comprehension, embodied experiences that are otherwise hard to communicate can be made intelligible. This practice is irreducibly and irrevocably subjective, but we might consider this an obvious advantage: who other than the persons themselves can better describe the process of understanding that unfolds in and through them?

Working through gestures situates knowledge through a familiarization that is thoroughly context-bound. In Southern Limburg, the geomorphology is a determining factor underneath a variety of landscape processes. It influences water run-off, the distribution of vegetation, erosion patterns, spatial contrasts, and microclimate. In abstracting these features and surgically tracing them out, one acquires a bodily sensibility that is layered, yet not fragmentary; context-sensitive, yet also largely generalizable; local, but also amenable to various scale levels. Walking through the landscape one has traced out once, it begets depth, relationality, and a logic all its own. It becomes active and organic rather than abstract and purely visual.

Third, such creative, embodied practices change and shape the bodymind. They cultivate an awareness to the fineness of grain, the interconnectedness, the multiple actors at work in the world and the processual nature of reality. In short, these practices allow for connecting to the world in different ways, tapping in to the full range of interactions (physical, gestural, haptic, emotive, intellectual) that the embodied being is capable of. Once the entire bodymind is activated in this manner, we organize our perceptions and concepts differently, leading to a deeper appreciation and valuation of reality itself. They appear against the background of a new horizon. In turn, this allows for our perception of reality to undergo a Gestalt shift itself, which we have called creative piety (Hanna and Paans, 2022). Through practice, appreciation, engagement and humility, one can alter one’s perception of the world.

This has a particularly important consequence: through this practice, one can construct a new transcendental viewpoint from which to regard the world with “new eyes”. By now, however, we should realize that even this way of speaking is misleading – it is once more ocularcentrism at work. A better way of putting this point is to say that we learn to grasp the world again, caressing its contours and shaping them. Our embeddedness becomes active, and not just a kind of Heideggerian and tragic thrownness. And once we are ready to assume an active role in shaping the world, we can choose to do so in a moral way, by assuming our role as citizens of the cosmos.

6. Conclusion

Only through corporeal entanglement with the subject matter can the embodied mind acquire and actively “hand-scape” the sharpness, sensitivity, and acumen required to judge whether a given design proposal is effective or desirable. This knowledge is acquired through a phenomenological pathway and is deep, layered and meaning-laden. There is a single phrase by Pallasmaa in his study on the thinking hand that catches it with breathtaking precision: the new, he says, “continuously emerges” under our hands (Pallasmaa, 2009). And, we should add, under the inquisitive tip of the pen as well.

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