Spatial Design Decisions Require Multiple Media

Spatial designers can’t create or manipulate space directly per se, but the walls, buildings, roads, and structures they devise can certainly affect space, or at least affect how people perceive, use, and experience them. Buildings and walls aren’t space, but they can embody spatial ideas.

Designing buildings and physical environments relies heavily on making predictions, educated guesses about how they may perform. Designers imagine, draw, model, render, and otherwise plan these spaces

These spatial design puzzles are particularly complicated. They’re complicated to model and represent in the first place, let alone making them accurate.

Such decisions are necessarily several steps removed from the actual spaces, due to the nature of spatial problems.

The results of these decisions quickly become the disjointed effects of a cascade of dependent design decisions, a peculiar form of reasoning that skips across several media, from ideas to drawings to concrete/glass/steel/wood to the very perceptions of the people who will occupy the buildings once built.

Under what conditions does a thin double-line representing a glass window become a delegate for visual connection, a voyeuristic frame and theatrical hinge as in Rear Window, a source of illumination with the sun as its accomplice, or a mere clerical satisfaction of imposed zoning requirements?

This illustrates much of the reasoning that spatial designers grapple with, and it’s quite a different mindset from that of inhabiting a designed space. While an airline passenger may navigate an airport using their knowledge of how such complex places are organized, guided by signs, maps, and other way-finding implements, an airport’s designer has to predict how thousands of passengers (and pilots, staff, mechanics, etc.) will also move about, and thus orchestrate the dynamics of such spaces without actually physically prototyping an airport at full scale.

Each of these scenarios is complicated. Spatial designers like architects, urban planners, industrial engineers – and yes, game designers – need to work through these dynamics, which always seem to involve multiple factors and actors that intermingle and compete.