Hyper Space

Environmental designers must be spatially literate: They must be proficient in reading and interpreting spaces and articulating ideas about the quality of the experience of spaces. To promote spatial literacy among environmental designers, we need an effective medium for describing the experience of realworld spaces and for communicating ideas about such spatial experiences. Hyper Space, a computer-based tool, could function as such a medium. In this article, I first discuss the difficulties of communicating ideas about spaces and specify characteristics of an effective medium for communicating spatial ideas. Then, I describe Hyper Space: how it is used and how a simulation is created. After describing and evaluating its use in the classroom, I conclude with a discussion of other uses of Hyper Space in design and planning education and how it cannot be a completely effective medium for describing spaces.