TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · The Brief · AGE 17—19 · POSITIONAL · METHOD
Grounding the brief
Attach the source and ask for citations, because a citation is a pointer to check.
When to use
Any brief whose answer must be true about a particular place, project, document or person. In a studio, that is most briefs.
The method
Three moves. Attach: put the actual source in — the site survey, the bye-law extract, the client's email, the photograph — once you have checked what may leave the studio (the four-risks card on this map: privacy, confidentiality, copyright, security). Retrieve: where the source is too large, pull out the relevant pieces — a page, a clause, a table — and put those in, near the top of the brief. Cite: instruct the model to mark every claim with the attached source it came from, and to say plainly when a claim comes from nowhere you supplied. Then read the answer by tracing each claim back to your sources. The cite rule asks; your tracing is the control. A model can ignore an attached source, blend it with what it already believes, or pin a citation to a claim the source does not make — so a citation is a pointer to check, not a proof. A claim with no source is a claim to check or discard.
Watch for this
Grounding for show. If you attach a survey and then ask a question the survey does not answer, you still get an answer — generated from the model's default, and carrying the survey's authority. Ground the brief, then ask only what the sources can actually answer.
The Lab's note
Attach, retrieve, cite is the Lab's briefing-side habit for the retrieval idea in the Mechanics strand. The engineering has other names and bigger machinery; this is the version a student can run by hand, tomorrow, on one document.
Try it
Ask a model about the permitted height on a real plot, with nothing attached. Save the answer. Now attach the relevant pages of the actual regulation and ask again with the cite rule. Put the two answers side by side and mark where the first one was invented.
Prove it
Show one grounded brief — sources attached, cite rule stated — and the answer it produced, with every claim traced by you to its source or flagged as unsupported, and one citation the model attached to a claim the source did not make.
How it works
Retrieval-augmented generation is the engineering form of this: a system searches a store of documents, puts the best-matching passages into the context, and the model answers from them. Grounding the brief by hand is the same structure at the scale of one conversation. The Mechanics strand explains why retrieval is really a way of spending the context budget. This card is the briefing habit that uses it.
What this idea builds on
- A starting idea.
What this idea opens up
Sources
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.