VISUAL IMAGES SKIMMED AS MEMES - ABSTRACT

Usually, architecture students make a visual search through many images before and during the design process. These images, which involve photographs, perspective drawings of the various buildings, views captured from virtual/physical models of design presentations, can be reached easily via web or magazines in today’s communication medium. It is a skimming through such visual images, has effects on both the design process an on the final product.

Dawkin (1976) published an article examining ‘units of cultural transmission’. He called these units as ‘memes’ referring the word ‘genes’ with their all evolution theory. He examples memes such; “tunes, ideas, cloth phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making posts or of building arches, etc. (Langrish). These ‘memes’ are considered that combining themselves every time being unique; different from the others,  they are passing from one to other (these transferring points can be either person or places, or even be cyberspaces’ places in today’s communication medium) like the genes.

Langrish deepens this ‘meme’ notion and specifies them; recipemes, selectemes, explanemes. These words refer transmittable ideas about how to do things (recipemes), ideas about what sort of thing a person wants to do (selectemes), and ideas that provide the basis for answering why questions (explanemes).  Moreover, he argues that these memes are such an expansion like epidemiology. They always affect one other and this situation supports the diversity.

With this point of view, visual images that are skimmed through can be argued as a kind of meme. In order to understand the affects and potentials of this cumulative knowledge gathered from visual search; there will be a study with by architecture students. The basic aim of the study will be understand how the affect of visual data is and how it is montaged by the student as a final product, because, mainly after this visual skimming the student make a mental model/image among these visual sections in his mind. With this purpose, the meme categories that Langrish argues will be the basic of the study. It is going to be searched if the images flowing today’s architecture community have the feature of recipemes (how is done) and explanemes (why is done) more than of selectemes (what is done) or not during the visual search of an architecture student.