Lockdowns and solutions 

Yesterday, on October 13, 2020, seven months after the first lockdown in the Netherlands, the Dutch government announced the second, this time partial lockdown. To my surprise, the news was received generally positively. I guess people under such conditions want clarity, not choice and the responsibility and uncertainty that go with it. This could be a reason why we accept draconian measures with gratitude. Rather than having to interpret the basic rules of social distancing and protection from infections in our daily lives, we appear to prefer general restrictions and the consequent elimination of many situations in daily life. Why worry how having a meal at a restaurant can be made safe is there are no restaurants to go to? Remove the opportunity or temptation and the problem is gone - no need to solve it. 

I do not share the apparently general acceptance and approval of how the corona pandemic is handled in the Netherlands. This does not imply I'm against anti-corona measures, that I find them unnecessary or contrary to my human or civic rights. On the contrary, I support the need for change and accept the principles underlying them, as well as the inevitable effects and the resulting necessity for social cohesion and solidarity. These are part of my human and civic responsibilities. In fact, I see the pandemic as an opportunity to improve our habits and environments, to make our lives healthier and happier. 

What I doubt is the sufficiency of general principles and total restrictions. A lockdown is a very temporary solution. We have experienced how tricky getting out of a lockdown can be, as well as how easily we can then end up in the same problematic situation that seems to call for another lockdown - a vicious circles of binary options. Imposing a second lockdown, even if it's a partial one, indicates a fundamental failure, not only of the people and their behaviours but also of the approach to solving the problems caused by the pandemic. Have we learned so little in these seven months? That seems inconceivable. Unfortunately, too much attention goes to new measures, such as the use of face protection, and too little to how different principles, measures and devices apply to different situations, how they are interpreted, related to each other and other factors, refined and improved thanks to knowledge generated by the applications. 

This is my main objection: general principles and measures are meaningful only in context. By working out what they do in different situations we can evaluate their effectivity and cost, appreciate the complexity of these situations before and after, and generally improve awareness and the ability to find practical solutions in daily life. 

This brings me to what I consider a major failure of the governmental approach: we have been hearing how this theatre or that restaurant have successfully implemented the general principles and so managed to adapt their operation and environment, making them safe and keeping them profitable. Have such best practices been analysed and evaluated? Have we learned from them, have we worked on templates and elements that can be adopted by others, too, have we developed platforms for sharing knowledge and solutions? Rather than indiscriminately closing all restaurants, we should have rewarded and showcased those that have achieved the goals we aspire to and used them to educate the rest and stimulate general improvement. This is something we have to do, an inevitable stage towards safer environments and activities, which is only delayed by the second lockdown. It is moreover something we need to do even if medicine manages to produce the cures for COVID 19, so that we can be same from future pandemics with different causes. 

In summary, we need to work out the necessary changes with more specificity and in more detail, so that they become applicable to any context and meaningful to all, learn from best practices and try to generalize them. 

One could say this is a design approach and I'd take that as a compliment. Design can actually contribute much to the solutions required because by changing the environments within which we operate, it can also change our behaviour. That's what affordances are about: you can demand that people observe social distancing but putting markers on the floor makes it not only easier to understand what one should do but actually part of our interaction with the environment: a constraints that's easy to observe. It's the same magic as with a flimsy piece of tape that cordons off an unsafe pavement or the foam lines football referees use to position the defensive wall at a free kick: physically they may be insignificant but culturally we tend to obey them. 

Of course, its is even better not to annotate but physically change the environment, taking into account the anti-corona principles. This is often seen as a long-term development because it may require wider or multiple entrances to rooms or buildings, wider corridors, better ventilation etc: costly and difficult modifications. This, however, should not stop us from starting already now. There are enough cases where adaptation is directly possible and we need to start producing the best practices from which we can learn. All we need is willingness to invest and to share. 

Human resources

 Human resources 

Yet another student of mine came to the same conclusion after studying a couple of cases at a construction enterprise: the main problem is the human resources, that the people working on a project have to perform well if projects are to be successful. To be fair, it wasn't purely her own conclusion, it was what she was told in the interviews she conducted with the middle managers - and she took it over, as many others before her had done when researching different aspects of design and construction projects. 

Putting the blame on your workers is always the easy way out. Yes, one should expect every professional to perform at least adequately but if it doesn't happen, what does this mean? Is it just a matter of personal failure or do the organization of the project and the enterprise play a role? People may perform well individually and still fail as a project team - something rather frequent in sport. There, it is usually followed by changes not only in personnel but also in approach, e.g. recruitment structure and game tactics. But even if failure is personal, how does it come? Poor education and poor training are often blamed, as are inadequate tools. Especially with computerization, it's increasingly evident that outdated, irrelevant or cumbersome tools can lower performance by adding an irrelevant burden to users. 

We should keep in mind that people are fallible, that even with the best of preparation and organization they may still fail. So, in addition to them, they should be given the right tools for the job: tools that prevent or correct their mistakes, that nudge them towards the right procedures and steps, that add to their capacities and increase their understanding and appreciation of what they are doing. We shouldn't blame them for struggling to perform with tools that don't meet these standards, just understand what their problems are and solve them at source. Yes, we still need to change the world: we've been saying for a long time but have yet to start doing it in earnest. 

 The changing bicycle landscape

Yet another large-scale facility for parking bicycles in a Dutch city: https://www.omroepwest.nl/nieuws/4112690/Verlengde-tunnel-Den-Haag-HS-geopend-perroningang-fietstunnel-gesloten. Everybody seems to want to declutter the streets from the untidiness of bicycles lying around. The picturesque anarchy of so many street photographs is apparently something of the past. 

Admittedly the situation in busy city parts, such as around railway stations, used to be frustrating. Leaving your bicycle there was an adventure, often without a happy ending. The new, covered and controlled facilities seem much better for finding a place for your bicycle, the chances of retrieving it from there, as well as for the health of your bicycle. 

Still, every time I have to be at such a facility, there are things that trouble me. First of all, their huge capacity often seems insufficient. This can be due to the Jevons paradox: the bigger the capacity of the new bicycle parking facilities, the larger the demand for parking places. People are certainly not just invited but obliged to put their bikes there. It can also be so that the previous, anarchic situation had a much bigger capacity than people think. Distributing bicycle parking to every nook and cranny of a neighbourhood does irritate but also creates many opportunities. 

Even worse is the feeling of regimentation I get from the prescription surrounding my actions: everything has to be done in a certain way and at a certain place, without exception or variation. And this is not just a matter of sentiment: concentrating actions and their effects has a practical impact, too. You can see it in the flows of people from and to the parking facilities in railway stations in peak times. Some parts of the environment are then overused, while others remain practically empty. So, I wonder if a distributed solution might be more efficient and cost-effective for bicycle parking. 

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. 

Pedantry or communication?

Pedantry or communication?

"Don't text and drive" shouts the advice from the billboards along the road. I'm in full agreement with the campaign and its goal but I object to the advice: I do nothing wrong if I text and then drive - or if I drive and then text, for that matter. The problem is with texting while driving. "Don't drink and drive" made sense because the sequence was right: if I drink and then drive, then I'm driving while drunk, which was the thing to avoid. "Don't drink and drive" has a better ring to it than "don't drive while drunk" but "don't text and drive" doesn't express the troublesome synchronicity of texting and driving.
If I voice such objections, they're in danger of being dismissed as mere pedantry. "You do know what we mean" people say dismissively. I do think that I understand what they want to say but why don't they say it more clearly? I also manage to guess what small children mean in their agrammatical utterances but society still insists on educating small children and teaching them to speak and right properly, i.e. utilize grammar to express what they want to say with more clarity and hence effectivity. If good communication is rejected as pedantry, then it's communication that suffers doubly: firstly because it's not effective and secondly because the discussion is sidetracked to pedantic issues.

The home as background to video conferencing

The home as background to video conferencing 

As most people, I've generally enjoyed the tasks of the interior design of my own home. Arranging activities relative to spaces, building elements and furniture is a recurring issue, even when nothing changes in the activities or the building. Sometimes it is because of new insights, either from personal experience or from what others have done, sometimes it reflects new opportunities for change and sometimes it's purely due to boredom with the existing situation. 

Designing my own home is obviously from my own perspective and that of those who share it with me. I consider everything with respect to my actions and their needs, my interactions with family members and guests, and imagine the situation as I (and they) would view it: from the inside out. The external viewer is sometimes also taken into account (after all, I live in a practically glass house in the Netherlands) but their perspective is limited to what they could see in the garden or through the windows. 

The Covid-19 measures have changed this. Most of my professional contacts have become virtual, including through video conferencing. This means that many people now see the interior of my home from a perspective opposite to mine. While previously I viewed the arrangement of my computers from my vantage point, now on the computer screens I also see what the others see behind me: the photographs on the shelves, the kitchen sink and many other details from an often unflattering perspective. 

Many have taken action to remedy that and not just by using virtual backgrounds. They chose their workplace at home with care, so as to show a safe, neutral or attractive part of their home life. Some have separate places for working and for video conferencing. Quite a few feel that their privacy is invaded, while others make use of the opportunity to impress. For me, the interesting part is how strange sometimes my own home appears from the perspective of the video conferencing camera. It is as if it reveals things that are relegated to a fuzzy background in my own perception, arguably because I move and sit differently oriented to the camera in a device I'm viewing.