Reverse Abstraction?

In the first few weeks of the architectural curriculum, as many of you will remember, there was an assignment in Introduction to Digital Media that involved lowering the resolution of an image until it was just a few pixels, and then raising the resolution to the original number to see the resulting blur. It was a simple and practical lesson: don’t throw away pixels. But maybe we can find a deeper meaning in it as well.

Terry Irwin suggested a model for thinking about design thinking that resembled an upside down cone. At the tip of the cone are practical skills like image manipulation. At the wider end, the same kind of basic principle is applied to the world on a larger scale. This, as we’ve heard from many sources, is how design can solve larger problems – by using the same process at a different scale. I believe this to be true, but I think it’s also important to remember that when you increase the scale or scope of something, much like an image, it becomes more abstract.

Take the last two paragraphs for example. I took a rule of craft, the craft of digital media, and changed the scale of the rule to encompass the entire universe. It’s bigger, but it’s not more meaningful, because no new complexity has been added. It’s larger in scope, but less relevant to the real world, because it is so vague. Unlike the original rule, which affords an actual series of actions to be taken, there is no single practice that the new rule can define. It is no longer a matter of craft, but theory.

As I said in class, maybe there is a reason we’re put in silos – because when it comes to it, a small, clear image is more useful than a large pixelated one. You can’t reverse abstract the image, at least not without making it blurry.

That doesn’t mean we have to accept the silos as they are, though. Certainly, there are ways to escape the silos and practice craft on our own terms, without presuming ourselves to be all inclusive. And it’s not to say that theory isn’t important as well on it’s own terms.

And maybe reverse abstraction is possible. After all, as humans we can extrapolate abstract patterns into detail by simply making it up. But it does require time and effort. The urban fabric of a city erases over time any meaning the urban planner may have put into it to start with. In the process of reverse abstraction doesn’t it become about specialized craft all over again, and therefore lose the meaning of the larger theory?