Lines: Orderly and Messy

Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Springer Proceedings in Complexity book series (SPCOM)

Abstract

People arrange things in the world. Those organizations, dishes of various sizes and shapes piled up on shelves, windows aligned on buildings, buildings lined up on streets, create regular patterns, patterns that contrast with the random patterns of nature. The patterns are good gestalts that the eye sees, vertical lines, horizontal lines. The boxes they create form tables whose entries contain and may order like kinds. The lines and arrangements can support abstract ideas, categories and hierarchies, repetitions and symmetries, one-to-one correspondences and orderings, embeddings and recursions. Designing architectured spaces also relies on lines, not the orderly lines in the visible world, but vague messy ones. The ambiguity of these configurations of lines allows many interpretations, fostering the flexibility and creativity essential for design. Lines are what the hands draw, what the eyes see, and what diagrams the world.

Keywords

Architecture Diagrams Visual communication Categories Abstraction Patterns 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Masaki Suwa and Juliet Chou for years of collaboration and to Egbert Stolk and Juval Portugali for many helpful comments on an earlier draft. The following grants facilitated the research and/or preparation of the manuscript: National Science Foundation HHC 0905417, IIS-0725223, IIS-0855995, and REC 0440103, and Office of Naval Research NOOO14-PP-1-O649, N000140110717, and N000140210534.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Columbia Teachers CollegeNew YorkUSA
  2. 2.Stanford UniversityStanfordUSA

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