Retention and Protention Methodology: Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology as a Multidimensional Design Approach

Abstract

Despite humans’ common tendency to oversimplify the time dimension into a mere concatenation of events following a cause-effect chain deeply rooted in Newtonian’s universal time, it is acknowledged that time and space represent an ever-changing continuum which is highly affected (if not determined) by the observer. E. Husserl, in his Phenomenology, provides a counterpart to Newton’s unidirectional timeline in which past, present and future are no more fixed terms on which events are stationing. Instead, they are extremely complicated artefacts of the human mind that deploy memory as the main time-building device to project existence. Given this scenario, present (the ever-now) is precisely the moment when all the past experiences have built up through retention and immediately become future projection by a ‘protention’ mechanism. Arguably, this condition finds its extreme realization in the figure of the designer. This should be revitalized from its constraining association to space in favour of a more comprehensive role. The Architect, owing to computational tools and an ontological re-questioning of the discipline, is ultimately becoming the one who can draw connections through several dimensions and branches of knowledge. This paper ends with an academic investigation into a space/ time-oriented design approach that deploys human memory-construction processes and innovative time-based computational operations, providing a platform for further academic research on this line.