DIMENSIONS OF TIME

One of our basic concerns was to investigate the possibility of incorporating different qualities of time to the design and decision-making processes. A significant feature of the Fuzzy Adaptive Intervention Plan is that it works both on-line (in real time) and off-line, which gives us the opportunity to enhance the processes of interpretation and reasoning.

The whole plan operates in a universal, non-reversible time where each local choice is unpredictably involved to the future configuration of space whereas having a non-definable past. Theoretically, the history of the system is formed by choosing paths through an elaborate tree of bifurcations characteristic of its inherent complexity and unpredictability. Non-reversible time is actually a creative and evolutionary element that unites the local actions into a global universe. According to the fuzzy logic the local choice is distributed to the total of possible paths, which are all valid in different degrees.

On the other hand there is an internal time that corresponds to the transformation of the preceding-images, to the internal representation of the built environment. This idea expressed by Parks and Thrift [35] is that we could form a temporal descriptive tool by unfolding the palimpsest of recorded decisions-transformations. In other words, we could unfold the information stored in the system by reversing time in discrete steps and tracking the specific path of decisions taken. Since however decisions are fuzzy, we should expect to uncover a fuzzy path.