Conceptmapping Thesis: Chapter 2, part 1.
2. Background Investigations
“It is in symbolic, visual terms that the designer ultimately realises his perceptions and experiences; and it is in the world of symbols that man lives. The symbol is thus the common language between the artist and spectator”
Brian Lawson - How Designers Think
In this chapter, we survey various texts to get some ideas of what makes language difficult to instantly comprehend. We disseminate the ideas of structure and their relationship to representation in a ’space’, and conclude with some interesting results, leading to the design of the software prototype presented in Chapters 3 and 4.
To gain any understanding of a subject requires the ability to extract and manipulate its essential details or concepts. To become expert requires a thorough knowledge of the subject matter, to know where the boundaries for the concepts are, and to know what it is that constrains them to be this way.
2.1 What is a concept?
A definition for the term “concept” has yet to be agreed on by the academic community a fact that is indicative of the inherent ambiguity and difficulty of the nature of the word. The meaning presented here should be viewed in its intuitive, dictionary definition:
1a general notion; an abstract idea (the concept of evolution), …
3 Philos. an idea or mental picture of a group or class of objects formed by combining all their aspects.- Oxford English “Complete Wordfinder”
Alternatively:
Concept is a regularity in events or objects designated by some label. (Emphasis added)
- [MIM]
For a long time, Cognitive Science held the belief that the human mind dealt in discrete units of comprehension and although nowadays it is accepted that these units can be very fluid in their nature, it is still groups of these units that we seek to exchange.
It is worth explaining the meaning of the word ’symbol’ because we use symbols to communicate and denote ideas. In this context, a symbol represents an abstraction of a real world entity or a concept in a person’s mind.
No matter what we experience, our minds will attempt to construct a set of symbols to represent the experience:
Langer shares the belief, with many others, that “this basic need, which is certainly only obvious in man, is the need of symbolisation. The symbol-making function is one of man’s primary activities, like eating, looking or moving about. It is the fundamental process of the mind, and goes on all the time.” [Nature of Maps]
Every stimulus that we perceive is subject to the process of reason within our cognitive capabilities. We attempt to make sense of these stimuli, and to fit it into a flexible framework on which we model the world.
