As regular readers will know, I've been working (slowly) on a rewrite of my BIS Thesis in Design Epistemology.  The original thesis was huge, covering way more material than anyone should attempt to cover in one thesis, and as a result it was rather cursory in its coverage of most of the areas on which it touched.  It was also written as a "design thesis", that is, as a designed work (mostly short stories) rather than a prosaic paper.

The revised thesis is far more prosaic and far more straightforward.  It's also turning out to be far longer, and still has way too much material planned to go into it.  So I'm trying to rein in the horses and tie off the ends.  I can look at covering the whole of the hundreds of schools of design, the varied approaches, the huge collection of "stuff" that was part of the original when I'm teaching somewhere and getting paid to write about it :) .

The current rewrite covers basically the "Toolboxes" section of the original thesis, that is, the theoretical underpinnings.  It doesn't cover any of the schools of architecture, the individual architects, the individual buildings, the individual mechanisms (such as proportional systems), that is, it doesn't include the "Treasure Chests" from the original thesis.  Even with that, it's now 52 pages long, and the final section (Play) could use some fleshing out.

What's it all for?  Well, as I've mentioned before, this is something of a "what I wish I had when I entered architecture school" project.  It's an introduction to thoughts surrounding the synthesis and generation of form; the process of design.  It's also, to some extent, my attempt to make my thesis material more "academia-friendly", with the idea that at some point I may get back to studying formally.  More than that, though, it's my attempt to organize thought around design, and to convince others to use that organization to think more deeply and usefully about the process of design.

For those who would like to read it, it is uploaded now (PDF link) and awaiting your critique.