Shaping memoirs: Intuitions, implicit learning, and architectural design

Designers acknowledge that they frequently use their intuition to inform their design process. The focus, however, of interest in design process research has been on those aspects that occur at the designers' explicit level. The aim of this research was to explain how the designer's intuition manifests in their design process. The study specifically, explores how implicit cognition helps understand the way in which precedent works in architectural design, particularly in the case of arrangement of shapes under a particular shape grammar or taxis.; To achieve this goal, a paradigm designed by Reber to study implicit learning was used. This paradigm was expected to mimic the implicit leaning process that takes place when designers use precedent in architecture. In this paradigm a finite states grammar of shapes was used to generate items that were employed for a recognition test. Participants, that were unaware of the set of rules imposed by the finite states grammar, were asked to recognize grammatical items out of a set of grammatical and non-grammatical items, after an exposure to grammatical exemplars. Participants were expected to perform above chance on the recognition of grammatical items during this phase of the test, according to what literature has shown for this paradigm. This result would suggest an implicit learning of the finite grammar by the participants.; Three additional sets of items were generated based on: colors, letters as in the typical Reber's tests, and shapes used as a control group. These additional sets were used to test if the implicit learning effect was affected by the nature of the test items.; Results indicate that the initial assumption did not operate as expected; i.e., during the recognition phase participants did not discriminate above chance for those items that were grammatically created from those that were not. The data, however, shows that subjects in each of the subjects' groups (shapes, colors, and letters) responded similarly to the first part of the recognition phase of the test. Participants, however, were not able to explicitly express a rational supporting their performance.; It is proposed that subjects implicitly learned something similarly out of these stimuli across the three different sets. According to the literature this could be due a type of shape's meta-level processing of the items. Additionally, a dynamic iteration was identified, which in each new exposure to a stimulus, participants increased their awareness of the nature of those stimuli, resulting in the generation of a real-time hypothesis about the characteristics that connect grammatical and non-grammatical items.; The analysis of the subject data presents questions regarding what was implicitly learned as subjects began to understand the qualities of shapes' meta-level characteristics. It raises questions about, which aspects were memorized by the 3 subjects and how they relate to the physical characteristics of the items, as well as, the physical and cognitive affordances of the subjects. Understanding more about these aspects will help designers and educator to better explicate the processes involved when designers' use precedents to inform their design actions, and additionally have a more informed understanding of the psychology of memory and preferences regarding the arrangement of shapes.