Experiential Media in Urban Design

Abstract

Architects and planners trained in the design of cities acquire the skills necessary to represent what exist and what might become reality. However, the richness and complexity of the real world cannot be fully represented, thus the designer is forced to select from reality. If the selection emphasizes the concept of space, the outcome is abstract, like theory, and open to interpretation. If the selection emphasizes experience, representations are equally open to interpretation, but show conditions that speak to the human senses. The historian Rudolf Arnheim has called the gap between thought and sense a deficiency disease of modern man. Some designers have taken up the challenge to create representation that overcome the split between concept and experience. This chapter exams their work, their motivations, the strength and the limitations of their representations. The discussion leads us to knowledge domains of psychology, how we perceive the world around us and how we become cognizant, what we commit to memory and how our perceptions shape our values. The discussion also leads us to methods of representation. To show experience, the designer has to overcome the static nature of representations, not to show the world frozen in time and place, but in motion and through time: representations that take the viewer on a walk. After review of work by Gordon Cullen, Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard, Benedikt Loderer and others, the chapter ends with a discussion about response equivalence. The chapter reports on experiments that compare responses to walks in the real world to responses from identical, but virtual walks generated by electronic media. The results reveal the challenge posed by the need for response equivalence and makes suggestions how to overcome some of the limitations.