1. Clarity. The book makes fairly complex ideas accessible to a first-year university architectural design student or first year graduate urban design student. These ideas just happen to be the ones that are at the core of all design processes and are often never explained or introduced to students.
2. Currency. The book's content is part of a cultural shift in education that moves design pedagogy to understanding cognitive processes connected to shape-making rather than formal design centred on object creation (addresses causes rather than symptoms).
3. Persistence. At the same time, the information in the book does not have an expiration date - this is persistence and foundational knowledge that sits at the base of all educational instruction in formal design.
4. Integration. The book makes no distinction between meaning and interpretation. The same skills that humans use to understand our environment are those that are used to design the environment. This book introduces persistent ways that humans interpret the environment
