Precedent Law And Style

[Jesper Sahu]

Specificity is the means by which browsers decide which CSS property values are the most relevant to an element and, therefore, will be applied. Specificity is based on the matching rules which are composed of different sorts of CSS selectors.

Specificity is a weight that is applied to a given CSS declaration, determined by the number of each selector type in the matching selector. When multiple declarations have equal specificity, the last declaration found in the CSS is applied to the element. Specificity only applies when the same element is targeted by multiple declarations. As per CSS rules, directly targeted elements will always take precedence over rules which an element inherits from its ancestor.

Now, when we talk about "order of precedence" in CSS, there is a general rule involved: whatever rules set after other rules (in a top-down fashion) are applied. In your case, just by specifying .smallbox after .smallbox-paysummary you would be able to change the precedence of your rules.

Also important to note is that when you have two styles on an HTML element with equal precedence, the browser will give precedence to the styles that were written to the DOM last ... so if in the DOM:

The generation and description of design precedent is at the core of design case scholarship. However, traditional standards of quality and rigor that are relevant for other types of design and scientific scholarship do not always apply equally to the generation of design cases. In this paper, I describe the nature of design precedent and the standards for evaluating precedent artifacts in a way that foregrounds access of the reader to aspects of design complexity in the design work being described. Standards of quality point towards the appropriateness and potential contribution of the precedent material to design knowledge, across the following dimensions: interest to other designers; rich representation of the design; articulation of transparency and failure; accessibility of style; and acknowledgement of complexity and scope.

Colin M. Gray is an Assistant Professor at Purdue University in the Department of Computer Graphics Technology. He is program lead for an undergraduate major and graduate concentration in UX Design. His research focuses on the ways in which the pedagogy and practice of designers informs the development of design ability, particularly in relation to ethics, design knowledge, and professional identity formation. His work crosses multiple disciplines, including human-computer interaction, instructional design and technology, design theory and education, and engineering and technology education.

Early in the design process, your architect will show you precedents to communicate ideas and better understand your likes and dislikes. We find that precedent research is most effective when clients understand its value and their role in the process.

This article will describe the precedent research process and how it will impact your building project. After reading, you will better understand how to deliver effective feedback and align the design team with your goals.

Precedents are analogous projects that inspire or steer design decisions. They help architects generate ideas and solve problems. Additionally, they help validate a proposed approach, assuring the building can be constructed and will operate as intended.

A single precedent will not cover every aspect of your project. Instead, your architect will break the project into separate components and find precedents for each. These components may include:

Early visioning workshops may involve visual feedback exercises where you will view images of past projects and discuss your thoughts. Your architect will ask about your likes and dislikes to better understand your tastes, goals, and needs.

Precedent research will continue throughout the design process. As you reach different design phases, your architect may introduce a new set of precedent images. For example, in Design Development, you will likely pick interior finishes. Precedent examples will help you understand how your choice will impact the overall look and feel of the space.

Precedent research is a crucial early step in the architectural process. It not only helps your architect generate ideas and solutions, but it also helps them better understand your needs and the problems you want to solve.

Ultimately, studying the work of others helps create a shared language and leads to more effective solutions. When discussing precedents, be vocal with your responses and specific with your feedback. A thorough and engaging discussion creates the best results.

In the architectural design process, built precedent can be a valuable resource to shape design situations. Typology, the systematic categorisation of precedent, may act as a means to interpret this information and identify relationships between existing buildings and new design. This work explores the link between typology and the design process and asks how typological thinking may benefit novice designers in the context of the architectural design studio. The research conceptually synthesises theories of typology with design methods to provide a practical framework for the application of typology in design studio teaching. Adopting a stage-based model of design, underpinned by the critical method as a description of individual design cycles, the framework offers a means of guiding project decisions, encouraging ideation and accessing information embedded in design precedents. The research is exploratory in nature and adopts a participant observation approach to develop and test the proposed framework. This is supported by data gathered from case studies, structured interviews and questionnaires. The typological learning framework is supported by the results of the research and considers various interpretations of typology at each stage in the design process, analytical processes required and practical guidance for designers and educators.

When dealing with the complexity of architectural design, precedent can be a valuable tool for encouraging ideation and analysing concepts. Despite widespread use in the architectural design studio, knowledge extraction from examples is often limited in scope and depth, especially among novice designers. Moreover, the variety of precedents chosen is often restricted to buildings with direct functional similarities or easily replicable visual tropes. This paper proposes a structured framework for extracting knowledge embedded in precedent and tests it in the context of a first year architectural design studio.

While numerous studies of precedent integration exist, much of the literature assumes an overtly mechanised processes of design. Studies into case based design (CBD), drawn from research in computer sciences and artificial intelligence (AI), suggest that adapting and combining previous architectural examples produces positive solutions without hindering creativity (Schmitt 1993). Automated systems such as those described by Maher and Gmez de Silva Garza (1997) adopt procedural interpretations of the design process and an assumed mechanised formulation of architectural creation.

A number of computational systems have been developed to aid the identification and extraction of relevant precedent information including EDAT (Akin 2002), ArchIMap (Tuner 2009), DYNAMO (Heylighen et al. 2007), ProductWorld (Muller and Pasman 1996) and PRECEDENTS (Oxman and Oxman 1993). These tools either lack an organizational structure or use pre-defined categorisation which require significant input from either the user or the creator to populate with information. There is little work done on how knowledge extraction varies through the design process or how it may falsify or corroborate proposed solutions and be used to inform decision making in inexperienced architects.

Studies looking at the extraction of design knowledge from analogical thinking (Wu and Weng 2012) or metaphors (Casakin 2004, 2006, 2011; Casakin and Miller 2007). Casakin (2006) have concluded metaphorical thinking was particularly valuable early in the design process. Eilouti (2009) drew similar conclusions, suggesting precedent information could inform a pre-design phase, presenting frameworks for the extraction of knowledge from example projects.

This work synthesises research in design methods with historical theories of typology to provide a framework that guides knowledge extraction from precedent at throughout the design process. The framework maybe used to guide decision making and corroborate or reject trial proposals.

Throughout the 1970s, alternatives to procedural methodologies arose embracing heuristic activity either as hermeneutic process (Hillier et al. 1972; Darke 1979) or a reflective one (Schn 1985). The critical method (CM) (Brawne 2003; Wright 2011) falls within this canon and is explicitly advocated at the case study University. CM has its foundations in the work of Popper (1963) and understands design as a cyclical process of initial conjecture followed by an analysis of the proposed solutions and then the elimination of errors, which then go on to form subsequent conjecture. This was first articulated by Darke (1979) who also proposed an initial phase termed the primary generator which pre-structures design situations through the experiences, prejudices and personal interests of the architect.

Wright (2011) aligns CM with a roundel model of the design process suggested by Smithies (1981) whereby through an iterative process, the designer gradually spirals in towards an ideal solution. Nevertheless, it is unclear how individual heuristic cycles operate within this structure.

Typology, understood as the study of categorising precedents, may provide an effective tool to structure the extraction of information embedded in precedent. Historical discourse has generally considered three distinct interpretations: typologies of architectural origins (exemplified in Enlightenment thinking of Quatremre de Quincy); typologies of construction and physical production (exemplified by early twentieth century modernism); and typologies of urban morphology and social production (promoted by neo-rationalist thinking) (Vidler 1977; Moneo 1978; Gney 2007).

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