Saturday, April 9, 2011

The final word on the Staircase Exercise

Let me put the staircase to rest.
But not until I make a couple of additional comments about the exercise:
There were 20 clocks in the staircase, and yes, you could’ve come up with that number based purely on the 2D projections. (not many people did);

My main motivation for creating this little PDF was to explore the question of ‘spatial interpretation’.
While people outside the AEC industry often confess to having problems reading plans – this almost never happens within the circles I work in, i.e. no construction professional has yet admitted to me that s/he finds it challenging to interpret construction drawings based purely on 2D (orthogonal) projections (many often acuse their peers to suffer from this).

Still, I wanted to be open to the idea that everyone in the industry IS very good at reading plans (elevations, sections) – so based on that assumption, I was interested to see if there was a measurable time difference between the two methods of interpreting a spatial task.

The results, I’m afraid to say, are inconclusive.
They point to the entire project being a bit ill-conceived and definitely not described clearly enough.

Gives you an idea while I had not done that well in academia in the past – have the passion and drive, not the patience to work methodically through the data.
Chalk it up to experience.






















2 comments:

  1. OK, this is your final post on the clocks in the staircase and toilet. I'm late to the game, so I looked at the first post with the 2D views (orthagonal(sp))and did not download.

    Got a mess of clocks with each attempt via the 3D views. Counted 19 clocks in 30 seconds +/- from the 2D views. Hopefully, the darker/lighter clocks refer to the visible/non-visible side of the wall.

    My vision is not too good anymore. I'm retired.

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  2. Hello Bruce -
    If you email me your email address I will send you the PDF;
    It is quite fun to navigate.
    No, it will not solve all the world's problems but is cool;
    regards,
    Zolna

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