ABSTRACT
Kevin Lynch’s classic Image of the City presents what we now can see as one kind of cultural knowledge system – an “image” of some complex conceptual entity. One piece of research involved asking students in a University of California, Riverside class to provide with a “sketch of a high school”. This chapter describes two very generic methods for generating hypotheses about cultural knowledge systems. It provides brief characterizations of some examples of applications of cultural models. The high school sketches cannot themselves have been the cultural models per se, but rather these have to be specified, narrowed, and adapted mappings that were derived from the cultural models. In order to determine and establish the empirical status of given cultural models we need hypotheses – based on those tentative cultural models – to test, and then need to use feedback from the tests to further refine the posited cultural models.
