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Visualizing Complex Design: The Evolution of Gigamaps

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Book cover Systemic Design

Part of the book series: Translational Systems Sciences ((TSS,volume 8))

Abstract

Around 2005 the concept of Systems Oriented Design (SOD) was slowly emerging. This happened organically through experimental design practice and education-based R&D at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Centrally in SOD is Gigamapping, a technique to map out, contextualize, and relate complex systems, their environment and bigger landscape, their current state, as well as preferred future states. The role of the Gigamap is constantly developing. This process has partly been a planned research process and partly a process of discovery and conceptualization through research by design. This chapter recapitulates and analyses this long-term process of developing the concept of the Gigamap. It goes through and discusses the sources and inspirations, the framing and methodology, and the concepts that were described until recently. Some of these concepts emerged as tacit knowledge made explicit; others were systematically planned and developed over time.

The paper concludes by introducing a new sense sharing model for visual collaboration.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Most notably is the Norwegian design consultancy Halogen (www.halogen.no)

  2. 2.

    The term object-oriented is used here in a generic sense. The object is any entity from physical object to service, incident, and event. Designers traditionally tend to have their attention geared towards such design entities or objects without questioning their boundaries or relational webs.

  3. 3.

    Ackoff was studying architecture. Rittel was a professor at the Ulm School of Design. Banathy, at Saybrook for some time, was connected to design methodology movements.

  4. 4.

    I am referring here to the DIKW pyramid: data, information, knowledge, wisdom (Ackoff, 1989).

  5. 5.

    This includes other stakeholders, like users or inhabitants in communities who are treated as experts.

  6. 6.

    For example, for designers the motor skill of visualizing through drawing is important in Gigamapping. It aids the sketcher in the internalization of large amounts of information as well as participants viewing the process.

  7. 7.

    TPG has since merged with Rambøll.

  8. 8.

    I relate this theoretically to Zwicky’s Morphological Analysis (MA) but a designerly less ordered version based in design work. This has some disadvantages compared to MA but also some advantages, though this discussion would exceed the frames of this article (Ritchey, 1998).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway

    Birger Sevaldson

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  1. Birger Sevaldson
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Correspondence to Birger Sevaldson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. OCAD University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Peter Jones

  2. Graduate School of Decision Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro, Tokyo, Japan

    Kyoichi Kijima

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Sevaldson, B. (2018). Visualizing Complex Design: The Evolution of Gigamaps. In: Jones, P., Kijima, K. (eds) Systemic Design. Translational Systems Sciences, vol 8. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55639-8_8

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