Cognition et création, Explorations
cognitives des processus de conception
by Mario Borillo and Jean-Pierre Goulette
(eds.)
Mardaga, Sprimont, Belgium, 2002
400 pp., illus. b/w, paper, €35.00
ISBN: 2-87009-803-0.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be
The title of this book translates as 'Cognition
and creation, cognitivist explorations of design processes.' I must
admit that I am in doubt whether it should be design processes or
processes of conceptual design because of the content of this book.
Most of the 15 articles or chapters deal with the first stages of
architectural design, the phases between the first formulation of
the problem and the formal and final plans. There is no reason why
the architect's work in this stage should not be seen as an artistic
enterprise within a more or less restrictive context, so it is exemplary
for design processes at large. On the other hand, some of the later
chapters discuss the processes involved in the creative processes
of choreographers and composers when they are still working on the
conceptual level, designing larger scale structures and selecting
key transitions, materials and contents, something I would rather
call conceptual design.
Either way, the authors try to model and understand the cognitive
processes at work in an act of creation. This is not an easy task,
and the editors are well aware of the difficulties. Part of the discussion
is about what it actually means 'to design' and fortunately, no one
tries to give a definitive answer. It slows down the pace of the book
as a whole, but it also opens the doors to a wider variety of approaches,
and that is what makes this volume worthwhile.
Part 1, Models and processes of design, is mostly a discussion of
the field itself. Part 2, Computation and creation, contains some
very interesting contributions on the use of computers in the design
process, both as an aid in designing and as a tool for simulation
of the act of creation. Some of the book's most provocative essays
are included in this part. Philippe Dehayes discusses the use of technology
in building operational models of design (in this case again, architectural
design) and Guy Théraulaz contributed a wild but brilliant
essay on 'How could social insects help us to solve complex problems?'
which of course discusses issues of parallel distributed computation,
emergent behaviour and auto-organisation.
The third and final part offers five more chapters on the cognitive
inroad to creation. Jean-Luc Soubie and Florence Buratto contributed
an outstanding analysis of collective and cooperative design models,
and the editors, Mario Borillo and Jean-Pierre Goulette, explore the
role of language in architectural design, formulating an outline for
an ontology of a formal semantics (!) of the architectural vocabulary.
For readers with a limited command of the French language, this book
may be off limit, but I would advise anyone who can spare the time
and who has a good dictionary at hand to try to enjoy the hilarious
and very clever essay by Jean-Pierre Chupin: ' "La Mariée mise
à nu
" (à propos de l'enseignabilité des
modèles de la conception)' or ' "The bride denuded..." (on
the instructability of models of design)' which reads Marcel Duchamp's
masterpiece as a blueprint for the creational process.