M´etodos basados en ´ındices

In its usage here then, and in terms of design, ideology refers to that collection of ideas and theories, knowledges and assumptions, preferences and prejudices that are present to or deeply embedded within the mind and actions of the designer by virtue of past education, cultural milieu, location in space and time, personal disposition and professional self-evidence; those ideas and positions – ethical, social, aesthetic, formal and technological – that each designer brings to bear on her/his design, and which informs and structures their design response, often without their full cognizance.

Undeniably valuable and valued – it is a truism that architects and designers, cries for freedom and creativity notwithstanding, embrace ideologies in the manner of life-rafts in a turbulent sea of aesthetic indecision and theoretical pluralism – the decision-making potential of agreed-upon means or norms or positions is not to be overlooked. This is not

to suggest cynicism: the moral imperatives of architectural theory from the nineteenth century green architecture, the formal dictates of aesthetic puritanism from modernism to minimalism, the laissez-faire but ironically conformist freedoms offered by postmodern- ism, or the supposedly deconstructive ‘slash-in-the-plan’ schemes claiming derivation from certain persuasions of contemporary philosophy, are, no doubt, genuinely believed by their adherents as right, proper, true and responsible for their time. Like all ideologies, however, systems of design ideas are normalized and naturalized by familiarity, expertise, pedigree and the dictates of an often unreflective ‘common sense’. In the taken-for- granted, uncritically-self-evident world of the professional designer, established knowl- edge, the attractiveness of contemporary views and – let us not deny it – the seductiveness of the fashion system, of which we remain so familiar in terms of its appearance and yet so ignorant in terms of its workings and strategies, are highly influential in conditioning design thinking, making personal and group ideologies central to understanding how buildings get to be the way they are. This centrality of beliefs, not only in informing design decisions but in actively effecting and structuring them, is paralleled in Rowe’s discussions of ‘enabling prejudices’ and ‘normative positions that guide design thinking’ (Rowe, 1987).5

It is this notion of adhering to or constraining within norms that sets ideology apart from that collection of skills and technical knowledge that the designer draws upon to ‘solve the problem’. Thus, while the differences between two or more designs based on the same brief may reflect differences in skill levels between their designers, they are more likely to reflect the fact that the designers are not, in fact, solving the same problem at all. Instead, they may have problematized the brief quite differently, one from the other, each applying to her/his program – aesthetic, formal, moral, techno- logical – different normative positions. They are working within different, and often conflicting, ideological frames, and their results are thus correspondingly different. Each is still a satisficing solution, yet each a solution to a different problem, one that is set not by the client alone and the determinate requirements of the brief, as convention might dictate, but set by the designer as a reflection of her/his creativity and her/his professional and personal beliefs.

This notion of problematization – differentiating the ‘problem as design goal’ from the more prosaic ‘problem as given’ – raises the awareness of control and choice. To what extent, we might ask, is the designer aware of the ideological frame within which he or she works? How cognizant is the designer of the extent to which her or his belief system and choices are always already conditioned by past education and experiences, by the influences of parents and friends, by the mores and customs of the society or sub-culture or profession to which they belong, and by the assumptions, preferences and prejudices that such groups engender? To this extent it may be said that we all, inescapably, work within a frame.

The term ‘frame’ has gained great currency over the last two decades in relation to contemporary philosophy and discourse studies. Its usage in the current context melds the intellectual, emotional and physical meanings attributed to the term by most dictionaries such that it supplements the intellectual identification of ‘an established order, plan, scheme, [or] system’ with both the human qualities of a ‘mental or emotional disposition or state’ and the more physical meaning of ‘a skeleton structure or support’. Significantly the term also has the meanings of ‘to give shape, expression, or direction to’, ‘to adapt, adjust, fit to or into’, and thus ‘to conform’. In this sense the

frame is literally that which surrounds, borders or contains – that which sets boundaries. As such it must be realized that the effects of such framing range from positive direction and focus in our thinking on the one hand to restriction and blind conformity on the other. Of the latter, the key questions are how does one recognize that one is constrained within a frame, how does one see outside it, how does one reveal on what foundations the framing propositions – self-evident, sensible, natural and apparently unquestionable in themselves – are based and how they are grounded, and why should one do this at all? In this sense, then, frames act like spectacles: we see the world through their lenses, without being aware of them, and with the firm belief that we see the world better for their assistance – undoubtedly with greater clarity but otherwise unchanged. Were that this were so! As many scholars from a variety of disciplines have shown us over the last 40 years – Thomas Kuhn on paradigms, Michel Foucault on discourse and regimes on truth, or Stanley Fish on communities of interpretation, to cite but three – while spectacles undoubtedly allow us to see more clearly, the view through them is inescapably mediated and precisely what we see clearly and why and how, are questions that should not be overlooked.