Cognition et creation: Explorations cognitives des processus de conception (review)

The title of this book translates as "Cognition and Creation, Cognitivist Explorations of Design Processes." I must admit that I am in doubt whether it should be "design processes" or "processes of conceptual design" because of the content of the book. Most of the 15 articles or chapters deal with the first stages of architectural design, the phases between the first formulation of the problem and the formal and final plans. There is no reason why the architect's work in this stage should not be seen as an artistic enterprise within a more or less restrictive context, so it is exemplary for design processes at large. On the other hand, some of the later chapters discuss the creative processes of choreographers and composers when they are still working at the conceptual level, designing larger-scale structures and selecting key transitions, materials and contents, something I would rather call conceptual design. Either way, the authors try to model and understand the cognitive processes at work in an act of creation. This is not an easy task, and the editors are well aware of the difficulties. Part of the discussion is about what it actually means "to design" and fortunately, no one tries to give a definitive answer. It slows down the pace of the book as a whole, but it also opens the doors to a wider variety of approaches, and that is what makes this volume worthwhile.

Part 1, "Models and Processes of Design," is mostly a discussion of the field itself. Part 2, "Computation and Creation," contains some very interesting contributions on the use of computers in the design process, both as an aid in designing and as a tool for simulation of the act of creation. Some of the book's most provocative essays are included in this part. Philippe Dehayes discusses the use of technology in building operational models of design (in this case again, architectural design), and Guy Théraulaz has contributed a wild but brilliant essay—"How Could Social Insects Help Us Solve Complex Problems?"—which of course discusses issues of parallel distributed computation, emergent behavior and self-organization.

The third and final part offers five more chapters on the cognitive inroad to creation. Jean-Luc Soubie and Florence Buratto contribute an outstanding analysis of collective and cooperative design models, and the editors, Mario Borillo and Jean-Pierre Goulette, explore the role of language in architectural design, formulating an outline for an ontology of a formal semantics (!) of the architectural vocabulary.

For readers with a limited command of the French language, this book may be off limits, but I would advise anyone who can spare the time and who has a good dictionary at hand to try to enjoy the hilarious and very clever essay by Jean-Pierre Chupin: "'La Mariée mise à nu . . .' (à propos de l'enseignabilité des modèles de la conception)," or "'The Bride Stripped Bare . . .' (On the Instructability of Models of Design)," which reads Marcel Duchamp's masterpiece as a blueprint for the process of creation.