Saturday 15 September 2018

Communication and orthopraxy

Communication and othropraxy


I was listening to the audiobook of a good novel from the beginning of this century while doing something on my smartphone, when the realization struck me. One of the characters in the novel had left a message to another character, announcing a visit. The message was left in an unspecified manner that clearly didn't involve the expectation of confirmation or other direct reaction. If the recipient objected to the visit, he should made it known somehow. That was how we used to communicate before mobile phones and the Internet. In shorter than two decades, new technologies have altered our possibilities but more significantly our attitudes. Communication has become more efficient and transparent but also more demanding: we feel obliged to announce many things and respond to probably even more.

One of the striking things is the multimediality of our communication. Some had expected that the Internet would promote literacy and verbal expression. Others have lauded texting language as a renewal. It turns out that text is less important than they thought. Images and pictorial symbols, from memes to emojis are taking over, turning most forms of communication into something akin to a comic book. Given my love for comic books, I should be glad about this development but I'm rather worried.

The likeness of our communications to comic books is not accidental. There's a combination of economy and expressiveness in comic books that makes them so readable but also rather easy to write (not draw). Telling something in a text, either short or long, can be a daunting task for many. Compiling a comic-book-like sequence of ready-made elements removes much of the difficulty of verbal expression, moreover in a way easily adaptable to the latest vogues - something with obvious appeal to avid users of the new digital media. It's also quite democratic: one doesn't need special skills to use emojis.

The problem is exactly that: it's easy to avoid developing any significant skills in expressing oneself and still be quite active in communication. In many cases, it just amounts to effortless and uncritical use of clichés. People don't learn to write, draw or invent; they just learn to follow.

This reveals a dangerous conflict. On one hand, we are challenging many orthodoxies and asking people to open up their minds, remove prejudices and go beyond old beliefs in order to understand and live harmoniously with each other or to advance science and technology. On the other, we are promoting orthopraxy in most of its forms, not only reducing creativity but also tacitly subjugating thinking to old and new conformities. It's not a new conflict but that it persists despite brave claims about the potential of new technologies for human society is telling.

Friday 6 July 2018

Dutch balconies

Dutch balconies 

Two Dutch news items on balconies in two days - that must mean something. First, we had a reasonable recommendation to make balconies compulsory for health reasons (https://nos.nl/artikel/2239652-verplicht-balkon-in-zorgwoning-beter-voor-de-gezondheid.html). Then yet another balcony collapsed (https://nos.nl/artikel/2239824-balkon-valt-van-appartement-in-groningen.html).

Neither surprised me: balconies are a luxury item in Dutch architecture (the climate doesn't really favour them but if the weather it's nice ...), therefore are both highly prized and among the stuff that gets easily economized; and if one has seen how balconies are attached to the façade of Dutch buildings (to avoid thermal bridges), it's a miracle that any of them stay up.

The combination is arguably indicative of the inability to achieve the functional and technical performance required in today's society. On the one hand, lifestyle quality has added to the requirements on a building. It's not enough to provide a roof over people's heads; the cost and impact of that roof and the rest that goes with it are such that people rightly ask for better and more. On the other hand, the established solutions may not be good enough: in order to improve thermal performance, stability is jeopardized. Rather than relying on the daily dynamics of temperature change to reduce thermal bridges, architecture seems to have adopted a static, questionable approach.

So, what can one expect from the proposed proliferation of balconies? More disasters? There is a fundamental conflict that remains to be solved.


Sunday 3 June 2018

BIM and smartphones

BIM and smartphones 

Another frequent question (and complaint) about BIM is about learning it: when can one find the right training programme? I often hear of expensive courses for employees of design, engineering and construction firms, as well as for students (universities don't often care for the development of some practical skills). Which one of these courses is the best?

My usual answer is that one should take a BIM course with the same people who gave them their smartphone training because they appear to have made an excellent job of it: practically everyone uses a smartphone nowadays, most to the best of their ability and, perhaps equally significantly, most seem happy with what they can do with it. People think I'm joking but I'm not.

What makes self-education and training so effective with some technologies? Does it apply to all things? Leaving aside a ubiquitous companion like the smartphone, which one inevitably learns to use as well as their pens and pencils (i.e. with variable yet generally adequate results), everybody seems able to work with text processing software like Word but quite often I realise that some of the key facilities may escape them. For example, even young people, seem unaware of page breaks and use instead long sequences of hard returns to move to the next page. Why haven't they learned or discovered it?

In general, becoming a good user of something complex like a smartphone or a computer program is a combination of understanding their fundamental principles and having extensive experience with their operation (and one many need more experience than another). We can teach the former and initiate the latter but one has also to keep coming back to the principles as experience grows to extend understanding of principles into a transparent framework that guides and explains operation. This is something that even university education fails to offer; what are the chances in a work environment?

In conclusion, anyone can learn BIM by spending time with it, trying things out and communicating to other users and experts. I'm not sure how far one can go without support in the form of theory and feedback from theory. What I do know is that smartphones have become so easy to learn not only because we use them all the time but also because they have developed interfaces and apps that are very limited and therefore easy to comprehend without much understanding. By contrast, BIM or text processing software are behemoths with interfaces that try to do too much and may consequently obscure many critical facilities or even intimidate users. Dissolving such software into a myriad of small apps may not be the solution but learning from the success of smartphone can only help.

Saturday 2 June 2018

Skilled BIM workers

Skilled BIM workers 

In discussions about BIM I often hear complaints that to use it properly we need extensive cultural change, especially concerning the habits and capacities of people who should work with it. People are accused of being negative and incompetent concerning innovation. It seems that it's quite hard to find people willing and capable of fully utilizing new technologies. Where does one get the skilled BIM users?

My reaction is that they should employ postal workers. When this is met with puzzlement, I explain that postal workers are fantastically good with new technologies: when I receive a package, they not only ask for confirmation of reception by offering me a mobile digital device to sign on, they also manager to process the confirmation in real time, on the cloud and in real time: within second, my confirmation appears on an online, shared information system that connects the postal services of different continents and notify every stakeholder of the action and of the new state of the project. Could one wish for more?

I hope they get it: the answer to most of our problems with new technologies and their utilization lies not in imposing new obligations and additional processes on people but in creating new, natural working environments, where on does their usual stuff with more ease and without confusion. The postal workers just deliver the package and get my signature. What happens with the delivery confirmation may be beyond their comprehension but by using the right tools, they ensure that the right thing happens. And it happens because the overall system, including the parts about human interaction, are adequately designed and implemented in an effective, efficient and generally reliable manner.

Had the postal worker been obliged to print paper forms according to some standard from the beginnings of the previous century, get signatures, dates and other processing or delivery data on them, then transcribe the data from the forms back to a computer system, we wouldn't have real-time postal tracking systems on the Internet. Many more mistakes would have been made, the personal capacities and habits of each postal worker would bear on the operation of the systems and there would have been widespread complaints from every stakeholder about the technology and its deployment.

So, how about freeing ourselves from outdated conventions and focusing on doing our jobs beyond such confines? Surely these conventions had been established to ensure that these jobs were properly done with the technologies available back then. Shouldn't we now examine what these jobs entail and how they relate to the new technologies and the societies that are already accustomed to them?



Tuesday 10 April 2018

Schools, performance and policies

Schools, performance and policies 

In the news on schools one reads in Dutch media, among the many items on ICT possibilities and dangers, the scarcity of teachers and the financial relations between schools and municipalities, the physical environment makes regular recurring appearances. The latest is again about poor interior climate and its influence on teacher and pupil health and performance: https://nos.nl/artikel/2224225-slechte-ventilatie-veroorzaakt-hoofdpijn-op-tientallen-scholen.html.

It is not the first time schools have been observed to perform poorly in this respect or that poor building performance has been linked to poor user performance. Eleven years ago, three Dutch ministries were already concerned with the matter and stipulated policies that should solve all problems (http://www.co2indicator.nl/documentatie/Scholen_richtlijnen.pdf). The big change since is that one of the ministries has been dissolved; the problems with schools persist.

One can interpret the recurring news similarly negatively and dismissively:

  1. They don't tell us something new: anyone with some experience with educational buildings (i.e. teachers, students, pupils, parents - practically everybody) is familiar with these problems, only we tend to brave discomfort with buildings, relying on our adaptability and tolerances to compensate for shortcomings in our environments. As a result. we tend to forget not only that buildings may underperform and that this certainly affects our performance and even wellbeing but also that we pay a lot to maintain buildings in such poor performance. 
  2. Design and management of the built environment are far from holistic or even balanced. Attention and priority switches too easily from one thing to another (e.g. energy consumption to interior climate), ignoring interdependencies between aspects and consequences of partial solutions. So, today we may focus on air quality and raise classroom ceilings, as easily as we lowered ceilings when we were trying to economise the heating bill. Other factors and relations, from overcrowding to expansive glazing in classrooms are not taken into account. 
  3. Policies are similarly partial and geared towards short-term goals. When energy is the issue, we promote measures that only economise consumption, disregarding the rest. The effects of a policy are often not explored in full beforehand and certainly not monitored or evaluated after deployment so as to adjust the policies or improve our understanding of the problem and its solutions. 
The bottom line is that when it comes to architecture and buildings, we are primarily geared towards making (designing or developing plans and policies). The customary solution is to make something new or even just more of the same, not use and real performance and how to analyse and evaluate them. Consequently, we keep on wasting money and tolerating poor built environments. 

Tuesday 20 February 2018

Repetition or variation?

Repetition or variation?

One of the primary features of Dutch building design has been uniformity. Organized development, democratic sentiments, planning regulations and related factors resulted into repetitive patterns, characterized mostly by translational symmetry, with mirror symmetries sometimes thrown in. Repetition is a powerful device that transforms picturesque scales and morphologies into something more urban and modern, even from rather early in Dutch architecture, as on the Groot Heiligland in Haarlem. 


Repetition has dominated Dutch urban development, especially in the suburbs that have filled the country since the 1930s. Local authorities enforced it rigorously, imposing uniformity even in small modifications like loft conversions, especially on the street side: the morphology of a neighbourhood had to be preserved, and buildings of the same row had to remain identical, sometimes even in the colours they used. 

More recently, however, planners have had a change of heart. Uniformity was deemed not just oppressive, resulting into anonymity (people had been joking that the only way they could find their own place was by counting houses or from the curtains) but also aesthetically and historically wrong. They pointed out that the most interesting urban places were characterized by variety, with buildings of various shapes, sizes and materials coming together into a harmonious whole, as in these pictures of Bergen-op-Zoom. 






One could point out that these buildings were designed and constructed in different eras, under different conditions (including planning regulations) and that buildings may come together in clumsy ways but the idea of variation seems to have caught on. More and more new developments take place under regulations that stipulate that adjacent buildings should have different floor levels, fenestration patterns, roofs and textures or colours. 




Some of the results are not uninteresting but in others variation is forced and superficial, making me long for uniformity. From a research point of view, it's an open invitation to study the perception of buildings and the effects of formal devices like translational symmetry on aesthetics. There used to be quite a few psychologists who were keen on the foundations of such perception. I'll keep on collecting examples, good and bad, and perhaps some time I'll try to make the connection with aesthetics and perception. It's a development worth following. 

Sunday 11 February 2018

Teylers Museum: a time machine

Teylers Museum: a time machine

At the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, reputedly the first and oldest museum in the Netherlands: interesting building, eclectic collection, typical of earlier times. I have the feeling of going back in time, not just because of the old, rather worn building with its sloping wooden floors and the old-fashioned cabinets that remind me of my school back in the middle of the 20th century.





What really takes me back are the yellowing, type-written or calligraphically handwritten cards and labels next to the exhibits in the cabinets - true remnants of a bygone era. It used to be like that, people made everything themselves, using what they had: scraps of paper, pens, typing machines - and we all thought the results were great.





Nowadays even the most incompetent computer user can produce results that would have been of the highest professional level back then, using fonts and clip art, colour and all kinds of effects. Our possibilities have grown explosively but I wonder if the same applies to our capacities. Nowadays there are too many machines between us and what we make, layers of mediation that attenuate feedback and make procedures even more prescriptive. If they ever replace the old labels and cards at Teylers Museum, I don't think I'll come back for another visit.

Critical or constructive?

Critical or constructive?

Having been involved in computerisation from the early days of its popularisation in the 20th century, I'm often involved in ambitious projects that aspire to develop Company 2.0 or Society 3.0 - that kind of visionary, disruptive and innovative stuff that has become so popular. My involvement is thankfully limited: brainstorms in the early, conceptual stages or evaluations at the end. I sit in conference rooms, like I did last week, and listen to big words with little understanding of the technologies involved and their possible consequences. People are drunk with the potential of their world - not specific technologies but the abstract, vague spirit of the age: AI, blockchains, BIM, social media, big data are magic wands that can transform their reality into something else, something new that will help primarily their career.

It's difficult to remain constructive under such circumstances, lacking in structure and clarity of approach. What I hear reminds me of people excitedly buying more and more stuff for their homes, gadgets and furnishings with questionable utility, without any intention of replacing old stuff, without any thought as to combine the new with the old, just overloading and cluttering their lives. Yes, one can be eclectic and promote heterogeneity into a virtue but coherence has its advantages, especially if it helps reduce cost and effort. Computerisation remains too expensive and demanding to take it as a mere collage of an ever-growing collection tools and micro-environments. It's not enough to claim that one's making a new version of the world; one has to specify this version in a coherent and comprehensive manner.

But even if I would be inclined to neglect the overall picture, it's hard not to be critical of such individual tools and micro-environments. People just buy any old thing from so-called developers and advisors (most of them are just resellers of products with added unnecessary services: servitisation is for the benefit of the seller, not of the buyer), impressed by modernity and peer acceptance. They buy things that might overlap with what they already have, things that might not do what they expect, things that might perform worse than alternatives digital or analogue. Even worse, they often seem unable to take a step back and look at the mess they're buying.

So, what am I supposed to do? The easy option is to just sit there and nod gravely, letting them do the interpretation of my silence. Yet I cannot resist attempts to make them think for themselves, to offer them some starting point for structuring and explaining their own thoughts. It seldom works; one cannot talk rationally to junkies, it appears. Let the world dissolve into tiny pieces, each governed by salespeople and PR. We're rich enough to support them all, it transpires.