TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · The Brief · AGE 11—15 · FACTUAL · DURABLE

Scale, ratio, and proportion

A door two metres wide is drawn two centimetres wide, and every length does the same.

The idea

Architects draw buildings small and build them big. A plan at 1:100 means every length is one-hundredth of the real length. A door two metres wide is drawn two centimetres wide, and every wall and step follows the same rule, so you can measure the drawing and know the building. That is scale. A photograph of your house on a phone is small too, but it has no single rule: things near the camera look big, things far away look small. Proportion is the relationship between the parts. Change one part alone and the thing stops being itself.

Why it matters

Scale is the promise that the drawing and the building agree. A mason measures the drawing and trusts the number. Later you will meet machines that make pictures of buildings with no scale at all, and you will know what is missing.

See it in the studio

A two-metre door on a 1:100 plan is two centimetres on paper. A classmate draws it four centimetres "to make it clear." The door is now four metres wide. The drawing says something false, and it does not look wrong.

Watch for this

Making something bigger so it looks important. On a scaled drawing, bigger means bigger. There is no "just for show."

Try it

Measure your bedroom with a tape. Draw it on squared paper, one square for every half metre. Then draw your bed and your desk by the same rule. Does everything fit where it really is?

Prove it

Draw a door two metres wide at 1:100, then at 1:50. Explain why the two drawings are different sizes and the door is not.

How it works

Ratio is the maths under this: a comparison of two quantities, written 1:100 or 1:50. Your maths class teaches it as comparing quantities. A resized photograph keeps its proportions, but it is not a scale drawing, because nothing in it can be measured by one rule. On this map ratio returns as the thing a generated picture does not have. A generated building looks right at any size. That means it has no size at all.

What this idea builds on

What this idea opens up

Sources

Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.

Age grows from 11 at the centre to 22 at the edge, and six sectors show the learning strands. Tab into the map and the arrow keys step from idea to idea, following the links where there is one. Enter opens the idea under the cursor, and E reads out its links and the reason recorded on each. Press slash for Search, question mark for the full key list, and Escape to leave. Open Ideas for the complete readable list, including what each idea builds on and what it opens up.

LOGIKA · RBDS AI LAB INDIA
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