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. 

Orthodoxy and orthopraxy

Orthodoxy and orthopraxy

Design methods are split into two categories: proscriptive ones that tell you what is acceptable and prescriptive ones that tell you how to do it. This distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxy is quite fundamental. One can fine it everywhere, including in religion: the ancient Greeks and Romans were arguably more into orthopraxy (making offers and following rituals) than orthodoxy (developing a dogma).

In archtiecture, proscriptive methods tell you that a classical or modernist building is what you should make. That's what matters and in order to do it, your building should include elements from the corresponding canon. It's not possible to make a classical building without elements from the classical orders.

Prescriptive methods can be seen as a reaction to proscriptive ones: it's not enough to know the final state of a design, we need to know the way to reach it. So, prescriptive methods love algorithms and sequences of well-defined steps. They tell you to do first this, then that and so on. If you're lucky, they also tell you when to stop.

One might be tempted to see proscriptive and prescriptive methods as complementary: by putting the two together, one would have a complete, strong method. However, I fear that any union would bring out the weaknesses of both. Proscriptive methods restrict designing to arbitrary systems and conventions leading to stagnation and frustration. From an intellectual viewpoint, it's interesting how they operate by excluding all other options but adopting them can be quite claustrophobic. Prescriptive methods, on the other hand, tell you too little to feel confident. They often amount to hill climbing: taking small steps towards some local optimum that may not be the best option or even good enough - but then you cannot know that as you move blindly around.