00:01So, I want to be, not contrarian, about terminology, but offer refinement.

00:08And I want to talk about diagrams because I think they're really, really interesting.

00:15And essential to our enterprise.

00:17And they're like maps, and they're like sketches, both words that we've been tossing around quite a lot lately.

00:24But they're unique.

00:27I think most of us can call that a sketch.

00:30It had characteristics of having been made quickly.

00:32It has characteristics of representing some real-world attributes like texture sometimes, or color, or outline, et cetera.

00:43Many of you will recognize that as a map.

00:46It also has some relationship to some real-world stuff.

00:50Either shape or scale, but not both.

00:55And other kinds of abstractions to be sure, but kind of one-to-one mappings.

01:00That's one reason we call it the map to the world.

01:04And then there are these critters called diagrams, which are graphic things.

01:10And they talk about, or represent, or abstract, real-world and spatial things, but in a different way.

01:19And in critically different ways.

01:23Diagrams graphically represent high levels of abstraction, just as maps do...

01:28...and perhaps in a different way that sketches and photographs do.

01:34They emphasize critically elements and relations, a good basic database concept, such as topology, for example.

01:43Connectedness.

01:45Existence.

01:47Duality, singularity, and other kinds of high-level topological constructions...

01:53...rather than, for example, measurement or detail that you would find often in a map or a sketch.

02:01And they're often used in the process of explanation or argument...

02:05...whether with yourself or your client, your instructor, your students, your colleagues.

02:12There are many kinds of familiar diagrams in different disciplines.

02:17They all have the characteristics I talked about, having elements and relations in them.

02:22They use color.

02:24They often use arrows for various reasons.

02:28They are...even though they may...some of them are more maplike than others.

02:33They're not maps in ways that we can distinguish them, and to be sure, there are...

02:38...this is a continuum, and there are sketchlike maps, and there are maplike diagrams.

02:41And there are things that are odd hybrids that we can't quite figure out until we see how they're being used.

02:46And that's an important part of the thing here.

02:50Here's a famous one. Garden Cities of the Future, Ebenezer Howard.

02:56This is a fragment of a larger diagram, and he says, "Note: This is only a diagram."

03:03We can't make the plan; we can't make the map...

03:06...and I'll use those two terms interchangeably for now...

03:08...until we have a site.

03:10So there's something different here.

03:12This is a set of concepts, ideas, elements, and relations that have yet to land on the ground.

03:20And when they do land on the ground...

03:22...then they will generate maps and plans and work orders and construction equipment and all that kind of stuff.

03:29And here's a canonical, familiar bubble diagram from the architectural and land planning enterprise...

03:36...where once again, we see elements and relations and topological constraints like connectedness and maybe family relationships...

03:46...where color is used to designate there's something the same about these, but we don't know what it is, perhaps, even.

03:52Or maybe we can begin, it's so obvious what it is.

03:54And there's a very simple graphical palette that's constrained by all those semiotic rules...

03:59...that Bertrand and others have helped us understand the uses of...

04:03...that are used to map these concepts, not their terrain-based implementation.

04:11But what's so cool, I think, and interesting, and fabulous, and important, about these...

04:16...is that in fact they have this...some kind of a relationship to maps.

04:21They can be derived from maps.

04:23We can look at a map or a plan and diagram it.

04:26Or, we can take a diagram and instantiate it as a map or a plan.

04:32And so they hold this interesting...

04:36...dare I say, epistemological relationship to what we know and how we know it, and where it lands...

04:42...in the birth of maps and plans, and the design process.

04:48And Carl showed us multiple examples of diagrams in his talk this morning.

04:49So, to reiterate, diagrams embody concepts, or ideas, like inside and outside and edge and large and many.

05:01And if you go back and listen to the video of his tape...

05:04...you'll see he talked about diagrams and he said that designs are different 'cause they have different diagrams.

05:10I collected these diagrams and we combined them.

05:13And I kind of knew what he was going to talk about, but I didn't actually set him up to say all that.

05:19Ideas can be implemented and manifested in diagrams, and diagrams can generate maps.

05:26And you can run this back.

05:28You can say, from this map let's extract the diagram.

05:30Let's see what the ideas embedded therein are.

05:34Now one important role of this is if you want to make a change...

05:39...you can take your map up to the diagram and plat the diagram in a different terrain; a different site.

05:44Maybe you'll have a different map, and a plan, but the same diagram.

05:48And it's a one-to-many relationship.

05:50There can be many ideas embedded in a diagram.

05:52A diagram can generate many maps.

05:55A map can embody many diagrams together, as we've seen.

06:01In object-oriented terminology then, that sort of idea that's frankly borrowed from Lenaeus, and it manifests in modern programming...

06:11...you could say that diagrams are instantiations of ideas, so ideas are classes in a sense...

06:19...and diagrams become instances of them, and maps and plans, in turn, are instances of the diagrams.

06:26And it's a, I believe, lattice rather than a simple hierarchy, so that indeed, a diagram can have multiple ideas.

06:35And a map can have multiple diagrams.

06:38But these are three very different levels of inferentional...inferential argument and discourse.

06:47We talk about the map, so we care whether there's a cliff, and an obstruction, and a south facing.

06:54The idea was very simple. Two nodes and a line between them.

07:02So diagrams support logical analysis and inference as well as spatial.

07:09And that's important, because we talk about these in slightly different terms interchangeably.

07:14And logical analysis is not necessarily visual, whereas spatial analysis of maps often is.

07:21And diagrams sit in between here and support both kinds of inference.

07:26Well, if the cliff is between these things, then there's a problem.

07:30That's a spatial inference.

07:32That they are connected is an ideological concept, or even logical.

07:38I bow to the diagrams made by ModelBuilder...

07:40...but they're a small subset of all the kinds of diagrams that we need to be able to support in this process.

07:46Here's an example from the planning literature.

07:48This city river district diagram describes the recurring relationship.

07:53It further suggests potential linkages.

07:55The same elements that the generic diagram (city center, main street, peripheral 00:08:15

08:03...one role of a diagram is to be able to say, what's similar about this situation and that situation...

08:09...which are very different terrain and topography, but have similar urban functioning or connected kinds of roles.

08:15And you could take this diagram and create a map from it.

08:19Or you could look at a map and derive a diagram from it.

08:22But we don't have very good tools for doing that other than the human eye-brain combination.

08:29Here's a diagram that I caught in the wild this fall at the GSD.

08:35And I didn't have my camera with me, so I had to reconstruct it.

08:39You may not know what it is yet.

08:41What if I tell you that's a waterway?

08:46That's a highway.

08:48That's some green stuff.

08:51And that's some built stuff.

08:54Well, then that diagram can be instantiated.

08:58And the differences between the instantiation of the diagram can be noted.

09:05And here's a diagram that's a different plan of the same diagram.

09:11And the diagram possibly needs yet another diagram that says they don't have to be parallel.

09:17And the highway doesn't always have to be between the green and the blue.

09:22And they can go under bridges and get intermixed.

09:25Those are design concepts that we want to be able to record and move forward with.

09:30And so, the act of putting down this one is a lot like building a legend.

09:35And whether the legend or the diagram comes first, I don't know.

09:38But making a legend and making a diagram are exchangeable, interactive parts of the design process in important ways.

09:47And there's an instantiation of that, with some green stuff and some gray stuff and a highway.

09:54And on it goes.

09:57Diagrams are subject of active research.

10:01My Ph.D. thesis at MIT had diagrams in the title.

10:04That was 20 years ago, and in the last decade...

10:07...here, for example, is the fifth international conference on diagrams and diagrammatic representation and inference.

10:13The artificial intelligence community is very interested in these things for, I think, exactly the same reasons I've talked about.

10:20The interesting potent inferential role they play...

10:24...in graphical and visual knowledge and intelligence and other domains of argument and representation.

10:34So diagrams are distinguished not so much by their graphic style and conventions...

10:38...although there are many of them, and we teach and promulgate them and sometimes invent and break them...

10:43...but by their roles in design inference.

10:47And they're not sketches. And they're not maps.

10:49But they function halfway in between concepts on the one hand and maps on the other hand.

10:59And that's what makes them, in my view, so potent.

11:03Whether something is a map or a sketch or a diagram depends a little bit on how it's used, not so much...

11:08...you can't always tell by looking at it.

11:12But I believe they're essential in our GeoDesign enterprise, and that they require their own research agenda and software support.

11:21Thank you.