Editors’ Introduction

WHAT WE SEE Design professors frequently advise their students to learn how to see, linking to this charge such phrases as "bring the right lens to the problem," "apply vision to the creative process," and "learn to discern the eye of the beholder." First-year landscape architecture students are often asked to read Donald Meinig's "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene" (1979) in which he discusses the differing lenses people bring to landscape interpretation, urges caution about personal biases, and suggests that a better understanding of those lenses presents opportunities for enhanced communication. More advanced students sometimes read about Ralph Waldo Emerson's concept of the transparent eyeball as a means of creatively engaging nature, supposedly free of cultural and social constraints (Emerson 1836). As students learn sketching, they are taught that drawing and seeing are inextricably connected. In assessing the era of postmodern deconstruction, graduate students occasionally read N. Katherine Hayles, "Searching for Common Ground" (1995) in which she explains the notions of interactivity and positionality for the purpose of better seeing the vantages of others, including other species. Then, of course, students also learn design thinking, which is a method of envisioning some future reality though a process of empathy, iteration, modeling, and testing. From these and other experiences, landscape architecture students quickly become aware of the multiple defi nitions and metaphorical uses of the word see. It variously means to perceive with one's eyes; to understand; to visualize; to empathize with another's perspective; and to imagine (create a mental image of) a future reality. Over the years, articles in Landscape Journal have reflected all of these defi nitions of seeing. In this introduction we express our belief that seeing as a way of deeply understanding differing...