“Everybody’s talking about AI!” This week’s joke is that the US Education Secretary spoke enthusiastically about the introduction of A1 into early schooling. A1 is a brown sauce, similar to HP sauce in the UK. Contrarily, the Stanford AI Index 2025 Annual Report shows that people are now more aware of AI, particularly large language…More
Tag Archives: design
Absurdum explicandum
Following my previous past on different modes of explanation, I was interested in how an audience would decide that an explanation was inadequate, did not make sense or was full of errors. Avoiding the language of truth and falsity, I asked NotebookLM: “Please mirror these five categories of explanation with examples of explanations that most…More
Explain this …
In my previous post I explored how LLMs provide explanations of the “reasoning” by which they produce their outcomes (i.e. responses, answers, decisions). At least in their current iteration, platforms such as ChatGPT are tuned to generate an explanation independently of the process by which they came up with their response in the first place.…More
Dialectic between the verbal and the visual
In the 1980s, the architect, theorist and teacher Bernard Tschumi penned an essay “Spaces and Events,” which later appeared as a chapter in his influential book Architecture and Disjunction. In it he outlines an approach to architectural design, at least in a studio teaching context, that elides the literary with the pictorial, to the extent…More
From text to image via LLM
Text and writing are important components in creating architecture. To put it more strongly: text is deeply intertwined with the production of architecture, serving as more than a mere communication tool. Text impacts design thinking, theory, history, and the way the built environment is constructed — materially. As in my previous posts, I’m seeding this…More
Share your expertise
Google’s NotebookLM utilizes the RAG methodology for document interrogation, allowing users to gain insights from multiple texts simultaneously, while the University of Edinburgh has introduced its ELM built on ChatGPT for educational use. Both tools enhance understanding in specialized fields by enabling easy document uploads and tailored responses, benefiting users in architecture, law, and healthcare.More
Automatic pattern completion
In 1990 Arthur Postmus and I published an article about “spatial applications” of artificial neural networks (ANNs). In a more recent article, Gabriele Mirra and Alberto Pugnale at the University of Melbourne developed up-to-date applications of AI in design. They generously cited our article (amongst articles by others). I concur with their assessment of the…More
Creative cognition
As I’m reading about brains and cognition again, I thought I would revisit an article I penned some time ago that tried to address the issue of creativity. Coyne, Richard. “Design reasoning without explanation.” AI Magazine 11, no. 4 (1990): 72-80. At the time there was a debate between two schools concerning how human reason…More
Designed to confuse
The article “The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design” by Colin Gray et al provides a compendium of techniques designed to induce online consumers to make purchases, commit to regular subscription payments, pay more than the initial price, prevent consumers from considering competitor offerings, and that enable platforms to use consumers’ private information or monitor…More
Architecture post-COVID
What are the spatial implications of social isolation? Demonstrators arranged themselves on a social-distancing grid at the Athens May Day gathering, conjuring up a scenario of a gridded world, where citizens move about as if on a chessboard or an early version of SimCity. Architects gravitate towards extreme conditions as a way of unleashing new…More