It is worthwhile to get a little more specific about what is meant in these pages by “information.” The pithiest version is something like: information is a state of things that could have been different than it is/than they are and that specific difference has the potential to be understood. Computers, for example, can record information because every bit can be a 0 or a 1 and we can download, read or use the specific pattern to know or do things because the zeros and ones exists in this particular pattern instead of some other. If the hard drive or operating system is corrupted so that we can no longer read or write to the file, the information is lost.
It would be a mistake to imagine that information is synonymous with its digital variant. In fact, common allusions to digital information create the impression that each recognizable pattern is equally informational. Traditional notions, however, provide for gradations of informational value. For an analog example, if someone says “I just drew a triangle, and its interior angles add up to 180 degrees” the informational part of that sentence is limited to the fact that the person drew a triangle. He or she could have drawn any shape – a square, a trapezoid, an ellipse – or drawn nothing at all. That he or she (1) decided to draw a figure and (2) chose a triangle out of all possible shapes are bits of information in a very literal sense. That a triangle has interior angles totaling 180 degrees, on the other hand, is not information. It is a tautology. That is, it is a given or necessary fact and its presence does not introduce something that would otherwise have been unknown or unexpected. It fails, in other words, to be information because it is not specific.
Thinking about information in the context of design, we need even more clarity insofar as anything we design or build could have been designed or built differently. So, it is first necessary to note that any built thing, by the fact of it being there by choice, is immediately informational at some minimal level. A McDonald’s built on a given lot is informational at least in its placement – even if the design follows the prototype so closely that it is essentially a tautology, like the triangle above. Emplacement is always informational. If you walk through a forest and encounter a masonry wall, you immediately know that someone or some people made a conscious decision to construct it. In its presence, we can ponder the whys, the whens, the hows – even if the answers to those concerns remain unanswered, there is always the possibility of discovering them and learning. Solar orientation provides another level of information, independent of the construction itself but still potentially intentional on the part of the designers or builders. The longer one studies an intentional thing or environment, the more information emerges.
What, then, signifies an intentional structuring of the environment such that it is informational in a sense greater than the minimal level described above? As hinted at in various preceding posts, discrepancies between conceptual and perceptual modes of understanding are rich in information. The key is understanding clearly from the start what the expectations of the environment are. Divergences from these expectations call the brain’s right hemisphere into action. There, hypotheses are formed about the unknown and the left hemisphere begins writing stories, myths, by which the world takes on meaning even if – perhaps especially if, we don’t yet understand it.[i] That description of the emergence of meaning should startle you – it is the inverse of a century’s worth of philosophical and architectural phenomenology.
[i] Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 69-72.
Architecture is Fiction 