Chunks and Comics: Graphic Techniques for Understanding Intricate Landscapes
It’s a long-held belief among designers that they must draw to think. Designers embark on drawing forays to discover alternatives and make incremental decisions to advance a design. At Sasaki, the multidisciplinary design firm founded by Hideo Sasaki in 1953, we develop graphics to elucidate an idea or draw attention to a conflict that must be resolved. As designers, we serve as distillers and translators of complexity. We put ourselves in the shoes of the people evaluating a design proposal and determining its viability–whether subject matter experts or community members with deep knowledge of the places they live and work. We use many methods to depict adaptive and resilient landscapes in response to climate change, including Chunks and Comics, for which explanations and examples are provided below.
Visualizing Climate Complexity with Landscape “Chunks”
Many of Sasaki’s projects have a significant below-ground engineering component or jurisdictional knottiness that adds complexity to the design process and solution. To understand the intricacies of a site and to explain them in a way decision-makers and the public can understand, designers must unpack the systems and pieces of the landscape and determine how to represent them with graphic clarity. One device for depicting complex landscapes that is well represented in Sasaki’s work is the use of small axonometric sections, which staff refer to as landscape “chunks.” These little diagrams serve as abstract vignettes to depict—with added dimension suggesting surface and below-ground layers—existing conditions or proposed systems on a site. Landscape chunks help the design team to break past “the two dimensionality of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen,”v which Edward R. Tufte believes is an “essential task of envisioning information.”vi This kit-of-parts approach is effective in examining a single component to sharpen understanding of the challenges and possibilities of a landscape’s systems.
Uniform in shape and size, and often arrayed in a series for easy comparison, chunks are effective to show a sweep of landscape conditions and design options. Akin to the “small multiples” approach advocated by Tufte in Envisioning Information, landscape chunks are “information slices [that] are positioned within the eyespan, so that viewers make comparisons at a glance–uninterrupted visual reasoning. Constancy of design puts the emphasis on changes in data, not changes in data frames.”vii Summarized by Tufte, “small multiples reveal, all at once, a scope of alternatives, a range of options.”viii
Below are several examples of Sasaki’s use of landscape chunks to communicate strategies and drive decisions for remediating landscapes and building environmental and community resiliency in response to climate change.
The Ellinikon Park
The 2001 decommissioning of Athens International Airport provides an opportunity to transform obsolete infrastructure into a restorative and resilient landscape that will become a climate adaptive park prioritizing carbon-first design. In Figure 1, Sasaki uses the chunk method to illustrate opportunities to enhance local ecology and sustainability. In addition to images of the existing site overlaid with labels indicating proposed resilient design strategies, a series of eight simple vignettes breaks down the landscape restoration plan into chunks to explain tree protection, transplantation, and succession; seed stocking and distribution; and use of trees for shade comfort, composting and nature play. The display of options uses the same axonometric frame enabling the viewer to comprehend and compare dynamic landscape systems.
