TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · The Brief · AGE 17—19 · POSITIONAL · METHOD
The seven-slot brief
An unexamined slot is a decision you have handed to the model without noticing.
When to use
Any brief to an image engine where the output has to be yours: a design study, a client image, a plate you will present. Not for a throwaway mood test.
The method
Write seven lines, one per slot. Each slot is a decision: subject (what the image shows — type, scale, point in time) · composition (framing, point of view, foreground to background) · material (every named surface) · light (time, weather, direction, quality) · view (focal length, format, a camera sensibility) · mood (the affective register — a named photographer or film stock if it helps) · exclusions (what must not appear). Inspect all seven. Fill the ones that must be controlled; leave open, on purpose, the ones you want the engine to explore — and write down which is which. An unexamined slot is not neutral. It is a decision you have handed to the model without noticing.
Watch for this
Filling material and mood and leaving composition blank by accident. The model then chooses the view, and the view decides what the image is about. The opposite error is filling every slot out of habit: if the material palette is the question, specifying every material in advance ends the experiment before it starts.
The Lab's note
Seven slots is the Lab's scaffold. It is written for architectural photography, because that is the register most built-environment image work borrows. It is a checklist to inspect, not seven boxes to fill: a daylight study may leave mood open on purpose, and an input image may already fix the composition. It is not the only structure that works; we use a five-slot version in crowded rooms, and other teachers divide the same ground differently. It is the one we can defend slot by slot.
Try it
Write a seven-slot brief for a space you are designing, marking which slots you filled and which you left open and why. Then take a classmate's brief and mark the slots they left empty. Run theirs, and find in the output each decision the model made for them — and ask which of those were left open on purpose.
Prove it
For any image you show, produce the seven-slot brief behind it and defend each slot as a decision you made — including the ones you chose to leave open.
How it works
Most prompting tutorials teach two or three things — subject, style, medium — and leave the rest unsaid. Architectural photographs are described in more ways than that, and image models learned from those descriptions. The seven slots name the qualities the captions usually carry. Exclusions is the slot that matters most: beginners skip it, and without it an image drifts in ways they cannot explain. This is the image twin of the six-layer reasoning brief elsewhere on this map.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
- seven-slot-brief-scaffold
- Dreaming Engines and Grounded Generators
- Five Plates That Hold
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.