Technology adoption

 Technology adoption

I'm fed up with people asking the rhetorical question why this or that technology have a low rate of adoption in this or that area. What they imply is that we are fools not to acknowledge the potential of what they are propagating. Well, they may believe in the promise of blockchains, 3D printing or even BIM bit real evidence of performance improvement is often scarce. We are called to trust the prophets of innovation and adopt not just the technologies but also some prescriptive or proscriptive framework for their deployment and application. And if things don't work as expected, it's often the users' fault for not believing enough to apply the technologies as faithfully as required. 

This is irritating enough to throw the technologies back to their face but I actually think that the mediocre performance one achieves with many new technologies is actually what we should expect. The reason for that is that the technologies are deployed within contexts that define what can be achieved more that the technologies themselves. One can 3D-print a minimal shelter like a tent but cannot do the same with a conventional building of bricks, tiles, concrete, wood, steel, glass etc. 3D printing seems inevitably restricted to homogeneous subsystems of the whole. The way these subsystems come together to form the building has possible limitations and inefficiencies that remain largely unaffected. In fact, it may get even worse if 3D printing is overspecialized. 

Similarly, if BIM is used to produce the drawings, bills of materials etc. customary in conventional design and construction, then the performance of BIM is ultimately bounded by the limitations of such documents and the practices around them. Again, moreover, the new technology may reinforce the existing situation and make its limitations more pronounced. This, however, does not mean that the goals of the new technology have not been achieved: the documents may be produced faster, easier, more completely etc. The problem is that the goals are constrained in a timid or arbitrary way. 

Such constraints make it hard to understand the true potential of each technology because they define it relatively to others. Imagine, for example, that we are re-introducing the venerable dual technologies of pen and paper as an alternative to computing technologies (handwriting is actually one of the original digital technologies but not in the sense we use the term "digital" today - just think about it). We will have little difficulty exalting the relative promise of these technologies: low cost, wide availability, familiarity, no electricity requirements (hence good for the environment), effortless multimediality (at least concerning combining letters, numbers, drawings and various notations on the same page) - clear advantages over digital means. However, asking users to reproduce a laser-printed page with their handwriting would be unwise. It would introduce an arbitrary framework of adoption that could only lower performance. Asking users to write in a legible hand is not only more realistic but also meaningful and constructive. The real performance of pen and paper is unrelated to copying computer-produced text; it's all about the cognitive, psychological and other brain-related advantages of coordinated work with the eyes and the hands, especially concerning language, about which we have been hearing more and more in the last decade. Handwriting is making a comeback because we need it in ways that may be unrelated to computing technologies. 

Technology deployment and adoption should therefore connect to the real goals behind the technology and the real needs of the users, not the compromised first steps that are deemed safe in a fixed, conservative world. Such a world does not exist. 

Confusion and obfuscation

Confusion and obfuscation 

Back in March (https://alexanderkoutamanis.blogspot.com/2020/03/social-distancing-and-design.html) I was wandering what will come out of the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of both spatial design and human behaviour. The conclusion so far is that we've learned little and solved even less. To the disinterested observer our ongoing confusion must be quite amusing and educational. Every day in every medium some expert or inexpert has something to say. On the one hand, the media are to blame. They need to fill their time and space, so they invite opinions and discussions that have little point. Politicians join in, too, in vain attempts to seem in control. On the other hand, many people are unsurprisingly behaving as if the pandemic is over or trivial. It's very difficult to change our ways. 

However, what worries me most is the behaviour of scientists. I'm not talking about all those rushing to produce vaccines or other medicines but about the rest, who deal with subjects from the design and operation of the physical environment to the collection and analysis of data about human interaction. Regrettably most of them seem to be interested in easy successes, things that will support their careers and funding with little real impact. All they need is clients willing to listen to their claims. 

My hope is that the few who try to approach the problems in a comprehensive way will be able to describe and explain what's happening in a clear way that takes into account the complexity of both the infection patterns and the human-environment interactions within which they take place. Otherwise, we'll dwell in confusion and half measures. We'll insist on social distancing but when this affects major interests, we'll wear face protection. Politicians appear to be unwilling to put some pressure on airline or other public transport operators (after all, they're often effectively still state-owned) to improve their facilities. Ventilation in workplaces has often been deemed inadequate, e.g. in schools, so what can be done now that it is promoted from irritation to health hazard? Our lives and environments are confused and confusing, a mixture of unchallenged assumptions and fixated structures from a number of centuries. It's admittedly not easy to untangle them, even under pressure from a new threat. We've been negligent for a long time, preferring to focus on just a few issues, such as the availability and value of housing, at the cost of  overall performance. It's not just Covid-19, it's also the soaring temperatures of each summer that show how inadequate the energetic design of most Dutch buildings is. And I'm not referring to building stock from previous centuries; even recent housing can be grossly inadequate. 

Yes, we can wear face protection and fill every room or vehicle with transparent screens or fit air conditioning units to every building but that wouldn't resolve our fundamental problems; it would just displace attention and add to the complexity of real solutions. First and foremost we need to try to fully describe and understand what is happening, including every aspect and relation, however irritatingly complex. Instead, however, we are constantly in search of easy, piecemeal magic fixes and to sell them we obfuscate: we fail to mention things we already know because they undermine our assertions. We avoid explaining that the design of most environments we happily use today is inadequate - that it has been inadequate for some time now. Officials, either naively or stubbornly insist that adhering to existing building codes suffices. But as anyone with some experience of classrooms (which includes millions of pupils) knows that they easily get unbearably stuffy and warm. Moreover, anyone with some experience with the application of building codes knows how many exceptions and loopholes there are, even in apparently rigorous specifications. And, of course, if building codes sufficed for the problems we are facing, we wouldn't be erecting screens and placing arrows everywhere. 

So, we fail to acknowledge the inadequacy of what we have been making and the ways we have been making it. At the end, someone we'll claim it's too expensive to change everything so drastically and people will happily go on pushing short-term and partial fixes, which will cost our societies much more than a fresh start. As usually, most of us will buy it - and not always reluctantly. Even under these exceptional circumstances we desperately try to pretend that life can go on as usually, without taking the time and trouble to look around and try make sense of how changeable life actually is. It's therefore inevitable that we trivialize even the biggest problems and reduce them and infantilize them into individual nonsense, as a recent exchange between survivors of the Second World War and today's youth reveals. That's why the disinterested observer would find us an amusing example of what one shouldn't do.