Leveling in Dataflow
This is a great book, explaining very familiar concepts of dataflow diagrams for designers firsthand. Leveling is an interesting chapter there, I’m not sure if it completely fits with the use of “Clusters” in Grasshopper but it is obvious that the complex systems should be well organized not only to be perceptually “better” ones but also to develop a way to use parts of definitions again and again in different situations.
…How do you actually DO the leveling of DFDs? The discussion thus far has been misleading in a rather subtle way: while it is true that the DFDs should be presented to a user audience in a top-down fashion, it is not necessarily true that the systems analyst should develop the DFDs in a top-down fashion. The top-down approach is intuitively very appealing: one can imagine beginning with the context diagram, and then developing Figure 0, and then methodically working down to the lower levels of detail.
Generally, “spaghetti” Grasshopper diagrams are more appealing for architects and designers maybe because they somehow deliver the message that the designer is so “smart” that they can handle this complex diagram. They are even parts of the architectural and design posters purely as graphics, without carrying any clue on what is going on with the algorithm there. Anyway, maybe I should also force myself more on the use of clusters in Grasshopper. Perhaps this is a bit too harsh of a judgment, but it’s an honest observation of how we sometimes treat our tools as visual trophies.
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