Who has used physical concepts in design theories?

December 8, 2006 5:15 AM

What theorists have used concepts from physics (fields, forces, energy) as a way to talk about factors involved in the design process that are not literally physical (for example ergonomics/human behavior/psychology)?

E.g. a designed artifact that closely matches the (stated or unstated) requirements of its users might be described as being in a "low energy state". Writing related to architectural design would be of particular interest. I'm sure somebody must have used this kind of language in a discussion of design theory but I'm having trouble finding anything.

posted by teleskiving to media & arts (12 comments total)

Sokal and Bricmont, in their book about the eponymous 'Sokal Hoax' talk about this. However, they are phycists and are fairly disparaging of it (IMO, for good reason).
posted by jmgorman at 6:57 AM on December 8, 2006

Don't forget the famous and nearly ubiquitous mis-use of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. This principle, as I understand it (but IANAP), simply states that "within" any atom, it is impossible to know (based on empirical data) where a given electron might be with respect to the nucleus it "orbits." As I'm sure most MeFites already know, people mis-consture this principle to mean that "the observer affects the outcome of the experiment."

To be sure, the latter principle is often true (especially with respect to social science experiments), but it's simply NOT the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. I think that more theorists than anyone can name have misused this principle.
posted by deejay jaydee at 7:05 AM on December 8, 2006

ARRGH! No one mis-constures anything . . . but folks do mis-construe HUP. I really can spell, and generally do better after I've finished my a.m. coffee.
posted by deejay jaydee at 7:06 AM on December 8, 2006

This may be too artsy for what you're looking for but there's Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass or the italian futurists and simultaneity.

Or maybe chapter one of this book: "The Laws of Architecture from a Physicist's Perspective".
posted by claudiadias at 7:38 AM on December 8, 2006

deejay jaydee - It doesn't have to be within an atom. It's really talking about any particle. To see it you have to bang into it with another particle and watch what happens, even if that second particle is only a photon.
posted by bshort at 7:51 AM on December 8, 2006

Thanks for the clarification, bshort.

But on the topic of design, teleskiving, are you familiar with the work of Edward Tufte? He doesn't explicitly apply physical concepts per se, but he does have a rigorous and methodological (in my estimation) approach to data display and design. Maybe economics, rather than physics, is the proper analogue for Tufte, but if you don't know his work, my guess is that you might be interested.

[on preview] And what's this?! The Feynman-Tufte principle!
posted by deejay jaydee at 8:19 AM on December 8, 2006

Forces and fields have been used to model pedestrian behaviors: pedestrians are repulsed from obstacles
and get attracted to goals as if subjected to forces.

See for example, "Social force model for pedestrian dynamics" by Helbing and Molnar.

It can be used in architecture, for example, to optimize design of buildings for evacuation.
posted by b. at 8:35 AM on December 8, 2006 [1 favorite]

Gestalt therapy came out of field theory. (I assume Gestalt Psychology therefore also did.) The idea seems to be that humans can't be understood without a comprehensive understanding of their current environments. For the therapy, the founder and leading theorist was Fritz Perls.
posted by occhiblu at 9:28 AM on December 8, 2006 [1 favorite]

(Sorry, I think I misunderstood the question; didn't realize you wanted the psychology of design.)
posted by occhiblu at 9:29 AM on December 8, 2006

Leslie White's thermodynamic laws of culture were very influential in Anthropology and in the "new Archaeology" based around systems theory in the 1960s.

While largely discredited as oversimplified and reductionist, it lives on in true believers, but also in some serious and useful articles by the late Bruce Trigger, for example:

Trigger, Bruce. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 (background including usage in archaeology)

Trigger, Bruce "Monumental Architecture: a Thermodynamic Explanation of Symbolic Behaviour", World Archaeology 22(2): 119-129, 1990
posted by Rumple at 12:23 PM on December 8, 2006

(this is a total derail, but the uncertainty principle is actually not a consequence of quantum mechanics, atoms or elementary particles; it is a consequence of wave mechanics. all waves (sound, light, and schrodinger too) have this property, which is intimately related to fourier's theorem.

the stuff about compton scattering when you do measurements is an intuitive gedanken-way of describing it; but the salient thing is that matter is waves, and the uncertainty principle follows directly from that. this is, in my mind, one of the most important, but least understood aspects of heisenberg.)
posted by sergeant sandwich at 2:13 PM on December 8, 2006

Thanks for all the answers! I've marked the ones that I think got closest to what I was looking for, but all are appreciated.
posted by teleskiving at 5:41 AM on December 9, 2006