Carmella Jacoby Volk, Anat Messing Interior Design Department, Colman College, Israel 67
The diagram
The diagram is the architects’ way of dreaming, the ’no-place' encompassing the
utopian act, offering a world different from what exists, asking how we can change the
world. In this sense, anything can be a diagram –an image, an equation, a building,
an object, music, cinema, or comics – as long as it performs an operation, it is being in
a state of becoming. Thus, the diagram is projected onto the world in order to set the
relations between reality, its interpretation and its potentials of transformation.
We use the diagram as a critical tool through which we investigate the ways in which
the digital design process shifts back and fourth between actuality and virtuality.
A clear cut example of the diagram that works within its historical and social con-
text is apparent in Foucault's discussion of "panopticism". Foucault observed Jeremy
Bentham's plan of the panopticon prison as the diagram of modern disciplinary socie-
ties. In this way the Panopticon, detached from its specific use, operates as a "spatial
machine"- an expression that manifolds cultural and political conditions and generates
the social order as a whole.
Following Foucault, Deleuze def ined the diagram as an "abstract machine", by
emphasizing its configuration. The diagram is "in a state of becoming. It never functions
to represent a preexisting world; it produces a new type of reality, a new model of truth".
The diagram "does not function to represent even something real, but rather constructed
a real that is yet to come".^5
The diagram is abstract in that it makes no distinction between form and substance
or between expression and content. The diagram is not a plan or a blueprint, hence its
meaning is not f ixed^6. By understanding the diagram by its operations, transforma-
tions and configuration over time, the diagram can serve as a tool against architectural
typology.^7
Typology is the superimposition of form and content; uses, functions, ideas and
concepts that are linearly and literally translated into forms. Consequently, typology
constrained architecture, and the diagram, being ever changing and unpredictable,
liberated it. Liberating as it is, the diagram can easily be reduced into form, where as,
at this point lays the danger to the design process.
Haptic Diagrams as generators of design methodology
Alas, our sacred design process was in danger of being reduced to a formalistic diagram.
This new syntax , Haptic diagrams, is a new critical model formed to release the design
process from making the diagram the object of architecture. Haptic diagrams launch
the performative active aspects of the design process- rendering it perceptible and
actual.
It is the haptic that charges the diagram with external concepts that can be derived
from other disciplines such as art, cinema, science and theory. This is while the diagram is
the mechanism that generates their relationships and potentials of transformation.
Digital new media allows the designer to become more and more accessible to new
haptic knowledge consisting of data, forces, effects and transformations over time that
assemble the design project.^8 This has derived a new form of subjectivity, with a tech-