Popularisation

Popularisation

Not so long ago, when a particular founding father of my area was mentioned in a discussion (often unfavourably), someone would say it and the others would concur: yes, but he's doing a great job popularising design computing. It was a strange reaction: it combined negative undertones with a genuine pleasure that someone was trying to explain the value of the area to a wider audience. I must admit that I liked him; I wouldn't trust him (as most of the founding fathers) but I enjoyed his style.

Some time after his early death, I tried to re-read his books. I was rather disappointed. There was too much futurology for my taste but what made me really uneasy was the rhetoric: it was the usual architectural stuff, attempts to impress through references, clever observations and limitless, speculative theorising. It's forgettable stuff, after all. I'm not saying this just about this particular author. Many areas like design computing become too desperate to become accepted, to be admired by a target group - in this case, architects. On the one hand, it is only logical: this is the wider audience - schools of architecture and architects in practice. To succeed, design computing had to become accepted as a way of designing, appeal to architects who would then use it to compose. Only then would design computing achieve its true goals. The rest (visualisation, communication, information management) are mere efficiency improvements that have little to offer to the core of architecture.

Now that there's little resistance to computing in architecture, design computing still remains in the periphery. Eminent architects may use computers to design but most are just clever users. I guess that popularisation didn't work as expected, perhaps because the wrong target group was chosen: people who couldn't care less or who didn't have the power to change or interest in change. Another possibility, of course, is that popularisation mostly promotes the populariser, making him a known figure for what others have done. So, what do I do with his books? I gift them to colleagues who come late to matters digital and they are thoroughly impressed. He was really good at that, after all.