TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · The Brief · AGE 16—18 · FACTUAL · DURABLE

The space programme as brief

Write the programme as a structured list, because a model can reason about an adjacency pair.

When to use

Whenever a brief needs to carry rooms, areas and relationships, which is the moment a project stops being a mood and becomes a building. Use it before any plan-making, whether the reader is a person or a model.

The method

Write the programme as a structured list, not a paragraph. Put each room on its own line: name · area in square metres · who uses it · when. Then write the adjacencies as plain pairs: "kitchen — adjacent to — dining"; "clinic waiting — visible from — reception"; "bedrooms — not adjacent to — street". Then the quantities that govern everything: total built-up area, floors, the plot. A list like this is the oldest form of the brief. It is also machine-friendly: a model can read an adjacency pair and reason about it. It can do nothing useful with "open plan, flowing spaces." Machine-readable in the strict sense asks for one step more — the same named fields for every room, explicit units, and a way to detect a missing value — which is a schema, and belongs further along this map.

Watch for this

Atmosphere in the area column. "Generous living room" is not a programme line; "Living — 32 m²" is. Mood belongs in the brief, in its own slot — not in the place of a number.

Try it

Write a small programme, six to eight rooms, with areas and adjacencies a model could act on. Then turn a paragraph of client wishes into the same structured form, and notice which wishes had to become questions because they carried no quantity.

Prove it

Show a programme that gives the model relationships and quantities to work with — then show the spatial checks you ran on what came back.

How it works

Architectural programming in Peña's sense is problem seeking: stating the problem in precise written terms before any form is attempted. The structured list is its classic artefact. Current models read such lists well and reason about them. Producing a valid plan from one is a separate and weaker skill, which is why the spatial-check card sits beside this one. A programme tells the model what must be true. It does not make the model able to draw it.

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
ON-RAMP · AGE 11 · FIRST ENCOUNTERS, NOT GATES — IDEAS · — DEPENDENCIES
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