In the moment
Photography
I think documentation is of the greatest importantance. Although it's not a skill I partook through my years of academia, it's one I cherish now. Here are a few snips.
People are more that what they do for work. Here is a snapshot of my answer to the question of "What do you do for a living?"
My interest in architecture came down to how people move through and occupy space, and how much you can do by working smart within real constraints: local materials, non-destructive methods, a plan that holds up under pressure. Those are the same questions I ask now, just pointed at screens instead of structures.
A floor plan is a constraint diagram before it's anything else: circulation, sightlines, load-bearing walls. A wireframe does the same job for a screen, sorting what has to be reachable in one move, what's structural, and what can flex.
Richard Saul Wurman, trained as an architect, coined the term "Information Architecture" in 1976. Wireframing grew out of that field.
Reusable, named solutions to recurring problems: a stair detail that works across a hundred houses, a card component that works across a hundred screens.
Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language" (1977) directly inspired "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" (1994), the book that gave software design systems their vocabulary.
Legible paths, edges, and landmarks that let a stranger navigate without a map.
Kevin Lynch's wayfinding research in "The Image of the City" (1960) addresses the same problem that site navigation and user flows solve in a browser.
Deciding what a building is made of, and why, before drawing continues. Picking a stack is the same discipline poured into different material.
The Bauhaus (founded 1919 under Walter Gropius) built its entire curriculum on merging architectural and material discipline with design, the same integration this is describing.
I think documentation is of the greatest importantance. Although it's not a skill I partook through my years of academia, it's one I cherish now. Here are a few snips.
Systems thinking started with floor plans, pattern languages, and asking how people move through space, long before it reached software. The work I do now is that same instinct in a different material.