FIGURE 5.

An incomplete and highly speculative reconstruction of Utzon’s problem space. One crucial key to understanding the design problem space is to look at the nature of the several different types of representations utilized by designers. They can be broadly divided up into natural language, conceptual sketches, and contract documents. Design briefs consist largely of natural language sentences. Their level of precision and ambiguity varies. Drawings A–D are examples of early conceptual sketches. There is often no fact of the matter as to what they represent. The “what is that?” is often discovered and emerges after the drawing. Drawings E and F show the development of one of the ideas introduced in the conceptual sketches. The artifact is beginning to take a specific form and starting to be fleshed out. Drawings G and H are examples of technical drawings or blueprints that will form part of the contract documents. They specify the artifact in a very precise, complete, unambiguous, and determinate manner. The differences between the conceptual sketches and the working drawings (ostensibly both “pictorial”) are at least as great as the differences between the design brief and the conceptual sketches. See text.