Designing, Theorising, Modelling [Snippets 6]

RELATED TERMS: Narrative Environments – Environmental Psychology in Architecture

George Saunders (2022) writes that,

“Neuroscientists now suggest that the mind is always doing a form of fiction writing: proposing a broad scale model for the moment that is occurring, then improving that model by way of sensory input. Strangely, this revision process apparently occurs from the back of the brain (broad, early draft) to the front (final product, ie, this moment). The approximate, first-draft model (“This seems to be a restaurant”) gets modified towards greater precision (“A barbecue restaurant that is … in the process of being robbed?”) and then the whole thing may, most truthfully, become a series of unmediated observations (“People running, broken glass, smell of burning meat, man cowering under table holding single French fry”).”

Discourse provocation: Could the insight borrowed from neuroscience by Saunders be extended to suggest that the mind is always doing a form of designing? In this extended sense, the modelling involves theorising inter-relationships among processes of narrating, environing, situating and dramatising.

If conceived along the lines of the design of narrative environments, for example, the cognitive modelling would concern proposals about how the following, for example, are interwoven: the levels of narration (diegetic levels); the levels of environmental ontologies, epistemologies and axiologies; and the moment in the drama, in terms of who are the actants and how they are inter-related. This involves paying close attention to the cross-references and the deictic patterns at play, patterns of semiosis whose configurations are constantly being refined and revised. In this way, one establishes what seems to be the situation and what the appropriate responses might be, given its affordances and prohibitions.

Reference

Dunlop, F. (2023) Invitation to a banquet: The Story of Chinese food. New York, NY: W W Norton.

Saunders, G. (2022) ‘“Could I understand the people who rushed into the Capitol?”: George Saunders on how stories teach empathy’, Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/15/could-i-understand-the-people-who-rushed-into-the-capitol-george-saunders-on-how-stories-teach-empathy (Accessed: 10 November 2022).