Interpreting the Design Spiral

Zeisel’s design spiral is a device that allows us to visualize the empirical nature of design, and to articulate just how an ambitious vision shrinks into something called the TDET. However, there are a number of ways of interpreting and using the spiral as a framework for explanation of a past design process. I will briefly unravel these below.

1. The spiral’s first use here was as a means to understand approval of a development permit to change the physical and organizational use of public space. In the case of the OSE, the spiral was used as a framework to explain how the City agreed to build a fare-paying park on a public site. There was reluctance within the City to create a fenced and gated boundary that reduced the size of the public realm, yet it brought with it the opportunity for improvement of the deteriorating public space on the suspended Expo deck. In the seven years prior to the City’s involvement, the OSE design had been adjusted to integrate into longer-term plans for Creekside Park. The process had led to a 2008-2009 compromise between Science World and the City of Vancouver, where urban designers and landscape architects at PFS Studio and PWL Partnership clarified and aligned their interests. OSE actors thus prioritized certain design elements and agreed to

direction you’re coming, to see if people would hopefully connect with it... So we had to add a little bit more to make TD happy. This was the year later in 2013.”

leave aside secondary priorities to reduce the project’s scope and achieve a fit with priorities of the City.

2. Secondly, the spiral shows the movement of the TDET’s design iterations from visionary to practical, involving the realities of time, site constraints, budget, and scope as they followed the urban design reviews. Ambitions for the TDET were hindered by lack of funding: as Zeisel explains, less time is available for imaging in the later stages as more emphasis is placed on testing and presenting, reducing possibilities as budgetary and site constraints come into play.¹¹¹ It should be noted that the actions of imaging, presenting, and testing are a vast simplification of what designers do; for example presenting in an early stage could be argued as a vastly different action than presenting in a later stage.

This simplification does not bring justice to the complexity of designing and one of the main weaknesses of the design spiral. Design thinking (1987) by Peter Rowe, better articulates the nuances and granularity that comes in designing and provides an important contrast to the design spiral framework.

3. Thirdly, the process of TDET’s creation was not one, but a multitude of converging, design spirals. The OSE had many departmental reviews by the City (e.g., Engineering, Park’s Board Planning, and Transportation) each with its own image-present-test (IPT) cycle and emergent TDET. The TDET became a way for the OSE project to reach a state of fitness in Alexander’s (1964) sense for its context. The OSE was actually Phase 2 of the Science World dome 2010 renovations, intended also to integrate into the Southeast False Creek shoreline renewal. Although this analysis explains the design spiral linearly, it is evident, given the complexity of the design process, that many IPT iterations

occurred simultaneously. The spiral should be seen as a map that helps guide a chronological design process.

4. Fourthly, the spiral, through its image-present-test cycle, illustrates the social nature of design. While this analysis explains the “how”, just who was responsible for the TD

111 As illustrated, “Major conceptual design shifts made this late in the process can be costly. When the design team feels that working drawings adequately presents its ideas, when regulatory personnel have checked that working drawings meet legal standards, and when specialist consultants have reported that their criteria have been met, working drawings are complete. At this point a contractor is hired to construct the building” (Zeisel, 1983, p. 4).

Environmental Trail design? A simple response would be a combination of Science World’s exhibit designers, the PFS Studio landscape architects, and designers with the City of Vancouver. Yet, if understood through Zeisel’s image-test-present-actions, these design teams may only account for authorship of “presentation”. Efforts rested more heavily on tests from Science World executives, engineering consultants, the City of Vancouver’s many departments, and funders such as TD and Ken Spencer. The process appears to be a complex interrelation of aspirations from numerous actors:

Interviewee 4: You’ve got to understand… it’s so hard to tell the story of this.

Well because the aspiration to do something outside at Science World in the public space existed for at least 15 years prior to it actually happening. The CEO wanted it badly, it’s part of the reason [Ex-Director of Science world] took the job, was to build an outdoor Science Park. And he worked on it, it took him 10 years, working with the City, convincing donors that it was worthwhile. The concept was floating around for a long time. A lot of people entered and exited the team. Basically, every curator there had pitched ideas for it or worked on it.

Interviewee 4 nicely summarizes this chapter: this was a project initially conceived in 1989, when Science World group moved into the Geodesic dome. Are those who conceived and defined this as a project also its designers? How about the funders and Park Board as they provided their tests and refutations? As has been shown, the project involved layers of

engineering, design, art production, interpretation and planning. People entered and exited the teams of both Science World and the City of Vancouver, and other groups. While the

sociopolitical map (in Section 4.5.1) defined a particular group of people responsible, the total number was much larger.

5. Fifthly, What the spiral diagram seems to miss is an understanding that a design is never completely finalized: that when built, more testing and improvement can occur leading to other phases in its development. The design of the TDET remains capable of further evolution; this is one of the framework’s weaknesses. Tied to the question “Just who is the designer?” is that of completion of the design process. Zeisel attempts to draw the line somewhere, although his argument is descriptive and a little ambiguous.¹¹²

112 As stated “The process of improving a design may stop, for example, when the allotted time and money have been spent and a design review team in the office judges that the product meets office standards… . There are innumerable

The TDET design process has been revealed here through Zeisel’s (1984) design spiral model, crystalizing the way in which form is imaged, presented and tested. The process is ever aiming toward a level that is “acceptable” for construction to all actors, or at least the major funders, involved. The TDET only emerges as a cohesive project within this larger spiral: in reality it is a mish mash of the OSE and Science World’s renovation projects. Its “final” form continuously shifted: elements presented in the Facility Renewal document such as Sustainability Underground (May 2010, Section 4.7.3), and the C-Wall from Urban Design Panel reviews (November 2010, Section 4.7.5), were removed from the executed “product to be maintained”.

Exhibits that were executed such as Cycling Corner (Figure 67), were simplified, perhaps as the project’s scope was reduced, from earlier concepts of, in the case of the Cycling Corner, the Energy Station.¹¹³ Its resulting form is shown below.

Figure 67: Cycling Corner exhibit in 2012 with a bike pump and a poster on how to change a flat tire

Source: Talent Pun, 2012

Figure 68: Cycling Corner exhibit in 2020, with the bike pump stolen

Source: Luc Bagnérès

Interviewee 3: The bike pump [was] stolen and the bike tools, cut off. I did research with the City engineer on the various bike pumps that had been used in public spaces. There’s a fair amount of vandalism in the area – we sit at the edge of the Downtown Eastside. At night time they would try to remove any metal that they could, it’s scrap metal to sell.

ways designers can use their surroundings to help them decide when a project is acceptable enough.” (Zeisel, 1984, p. 14)

113 Rather than an opportunity “to use bike-power to activate an exhibit”, it evolved into public education on the changing and pumping of a bike’s flat tire. To its right, a bike counter is installed providing data on the number of cyclists passing by this spot along False Creek.

In 2013, just a few months after the TD Bank helped to inaugurate the Environmental Trail, the bike pump and flat tire stand from the Cycling Corner exhibit were stolen (Figure 68).

This reveals a vulnerability in the installation of public learning environments. Does that make such thieves part of the design process as well?¹¹⁴ Without funding, as the Cycling Corner shows, keeping these exhibits operating effectively as learning environments is significantly reduced.¹¹⁵ The line between “conception, design, and execution”, and the “maintenance” of a public learning environment, has yet to be defined.

114 As we have seen with the Energy station exhibit, design is also about reduction. Without glorifying criminals as designers, people clearly not involved in Zeisel’s “design spiral” showed up and reduced the range of possible interactions for Cycling Corner, without asking for a City development permit. From 2013 onward, Science World became steward of the KSSP and the TDET.

115 The funding made available for the maintenance of the TDET was not found in this research.