Learning about shape semantics: a situated learning approach

Designers recognise or make sense of objects in the context "situations" of other things. Design cannot be predicted and you have to be “at a particular set of states” in order to decide what to do. The inability to determine a priori all design states implies that any design process cannot be pre-planned and design actions cannot be pre-defined. Situated learning is based on the notion that knowledge is contextually situated and is fundamentally influenced by the context in which it is used. We propose a situated learning approach in the domain of architectural shapes design. This paper elaborates the concept of situated learning and demonstrates what it produces in the domain of shape semantics.