Models, Systems, Simulations, Tools

Models

A fundamental thought pattern we adopt is the idea of “modeling.”

A model is an analog for another thing built in a medium you can control.

Architectural models are analogs for buildings built in museum board and chipboard. We can control the board, tear them apart, cut new pieces, glue them together, etc., and we do so in order to represent a building, but it’s not the building itself. And there are things about buildings that we can’t represent in the model, like how much it costs, how much it weighs, or the sound made by the hard the marble surfaces in the lobby.

It’s this tradeoff that we make every time we model something. We tune our models to represent and control particular parts of our analog, so we can make design decisions about it.

Systems

Simulations

Tools

Abstractly speaking, tools are an implementation model paired with a functional model.