Abstract

As collegiate architectural research centers engage expanded issues of study, conditions of fact and fiction often become difficult to discern. Engaged by communities to provide expertise and guidance, a voice of surety is required but what exactly are we sure of? How do we guide with conjecture? The ability to distill subjective data and draw meaningful conclusions is a trademark of design research centers. The work presented is reflective of an effort to put a cogent Face on somewhat questionable facts while studying how educators might approach information design with a professional ethic. Facing: Facing puts image to data, it attempts to fix a reading of what is important and how that data is useful to the future. This investigation finds it’s footing particularly difficult to delineate in that the work confronts a mass of largely subjective data coupled with slippery issues of political interest. How does one assign an image to such issues? Factoids: The word appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as "something that becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true." However, the word can sometimes mean an insignificant but true piece of information. In either formulation, factoids are potentially factual, just not self-evidently so. This work seeks to coalesce factoids as relevant yet clearly provincial assertions in the agency of design guidance. Conclusion: At the community design center we find ourselves in the presence of many things potentially factual but not clearly so. Much of the work of our center is the distillation of “soft-data” and application of reasoned interpretation. Emphasizing ordered logic and hieratical value this research confronts two important themes of representation and “Factoid Facing”. One is a linear reasoning and projected implementation while the other considers the totality of the issue in an attempt to open the reading for additional consideration.