Design Intentionality

Trying to understand the inner works of the human mind, the studies of philosophers John Searle (1980a; 1980b; 1983) and Daniel Dennett (1969; 1987) have deeply affected the research on the relationship between human reason and the computing machine. Intentionality, as one of the most ambiguous concepts that has long occupied philosophy, has a potential place in many other disciplines and research areas that are concerned with notions such as the human mind, human behavior and humans’ relationship with the environment. Such disciplines and research areas include, but are not limited to, society science, philosophy of society, technology studies, anthropology, ethics, linguistics, epistemology, ontology, cognitive science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics. Interntionality is briefly defined as “the property of human consciousness to be ‘directed toward’ or ‘be about’ something” (Duranti 2015, p. 107). In Consciousness: The Science of Subjectivity, Antti Revonsuo, a cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher of the mind, states the traditional definition of the notion of intentionality and its relationship with conscious states of human mind:

In this philosophical context, the notion ‘intentional’ refers to aboutness or the directedness of mental states at something beyond themselves. A further idea in phenomenology is that all mental states, including consciousness, have a particular structure: Mental states contain a mental act that is directed to its object. This is the bipolar act–object structure of consciousness. In any instance of conscious experience, an act (of awareness) must reach outside of itself to some (so-called intentional) objects. This famous phenomenological idea of the fundamental structure of consciousness forms also the basis of neurophenomenology. (2010, pp. 192-193)

In the field of philosophical field, the most comprehensive work on this subject has been carried out by Edmund Husserl (1962), who puts the question of intentionality at the core of his theory of phenomenology, along with the notions of consciousness, intersubjectivity and embodiment. Dan Zahavi (2003, pp. 19, 21) defines the Husserlian account of intentionality as “an intrinsic feature of consciousness,” which is “not merely a feature of our consciousness of actually existing objects, but also something that characterizes our fantasies, our predictions, our recollections, and so forth.”

In his book Approaches to Intentionality, William Lyons (1995) provides the critical approaches to the philosophical conceptions of intentionality in order to develop a multi-dimensional account of intentionality. Lyons (1995, p. 160). claims that intentionality is a “layered developmental concept” whose definition requires a complex approach and therefore it cannot refer to just one thing such as the “aboutness relation,” as the etymological roots propose. In the Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others, Alessandro Duranti (2015, p. 2) provides an integrated view of intentionality as developed in his idea of “intentional continuum,” in which he acknowledges “variations in levels and degrees of intentional awareness and engagement across any human individual and collective action.”

All these definitions of intentionality necessitate human consciousness, therefore placing the human subject at the center of any intentional act. Such a human-centered account of intentionality can be seen to leave the potentiality of the nonhuman as external and excluded from intentionality. This conceptual expansion argues against an anthropocentric understanding of intentionality, acknowledging the technological developments in which massive changes occur in computation and intelligent machine design.

The theoretical literature and discourse of architecture lacks a significant discussion or a thorough investigation of the concept on its own terms, mostly because the notion of intentionality grounds itself in the recognition of the mastermind of the architect.1  In Intentions in Architecture, Christian Norberg-Schulz mentions “intentional possibilities” with reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein 1953, p. 193 cited in Norberg-Schulz 1962, p. 22):

In general, we may say that architecture is a human product which should order and improve our relations with the environment, it is therefore necessary to investigate how human products are brought forth. Hence we should ask: What purpose has architecture as a human product?”

This presumption that architecture is a pure product of the human (rational) mind is indeed an unquestioned given of architecture that can be seen to be a product of the historical/theoretical conditions defining design intentionality: Once these conditions extend to the contemporary technological/ontological condition of computational design, this conceptualization of design intentionality as sustained in conventional design processes is seen to be displaced for a reconsideration and rehistoricization of design intentionality as embedded within both human and computational agents.  

Being critical of the humancentric view on design intentionality, Kostas Terzidis (2015, p. 17) states that in the conventional definition of design intentionality “[o]ne of the intrinsic characteristics of the practice of design is its reliance on ideas that are conceived, generated, or formed within the mind of a lead designer” who is “always exclusively responsible” for design which is regarded as “a particular, irreplaceable and almost sacred” mental process. This condition occupying the hard core of design practice is challenged by the replacement of conventional design tools with ones that computational paradigm brought together.

Since Alan Turing's introduction of the notion of a computing machine in the late 1930s, there has been a growing interest in a new paradigm for understanding the mind: a paradigm that treats the mind as a computer. The arrival of machine computation upon our intellectual landscape has had a profound and widespread impact upon research in the many disciplines that are concerned with the study of the mind (Horst, 1996, p. 1).

Access to the underlying organization and structure of some biological and natural phenomenon through the vision of philosophy of mind and cognitive science and by means of the developments in technology in general and computer science in specific have deeply affected –even inverted– some neglected accounts in design, namely; organicism, intricacy, complexity, growth, randomness etc., which were previously regarded as irrational, subjectivist, intuitionist, –therefore, unreliable.2 A re-introduction of these concepts into design research and practice has become possible by means of inquiries into the increased capacity of machine computation, creating as well an intellectual reversal the effects of which can be observed in the altered concerns, methodologies and tendencies. This has led to an expansion of architecture’s disciplinary reach and incorporations, and to the emergence of new fields of research. These areas include, but are not limited to, computational design, algorithmic design, parametric design, material computation, virtual reality, responsiveness, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. With the developments in technology and the expansion of architecture’s disciplinary boundaries, design tools and methodologies have changed shape and altered the intellectual landscape of designers.

ENDNOTES

(*) This conceptual expansion is an excerpt from the author’s PhD thesis that reinstates a discussion on design intentionality which has been absent in the conventional discourse of architecture because of a strong presupposition of its unquestioned grounding in the human subject, and which is only becoming visible in its recent problematization in the posthuman context of computational architecture. Duygu Tüntaş. “An agentic account of design intentionality in computational architecture,” PhD in Architecture, METU, 2018.

(1) However, there are well known approaches that aim to question and transverse the long-established roots of such traditions in architecture such as authorship and architectural program by bringing alternative or even anarchic concepts such as “non-program”, “collective architecture”, “anonymity” etc.

(2) Mennan (2008) refers to the Modernist mechanic-organic debate that promoted mechanic normativity, charging the organic with a “negative anchorage” within the modern tradition, whose reasoning and justification is associated with “individualistic, subjectivist, intuitionist processes that escape systematic analysis and rationalization.” Mennan’s claim is that the non standard reforms this epistemic duality and reconciles organic and mechanic by translating once intuitive forms into computational languages.