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. 

Architectural labelling

Architectural labelling

The joke works in Dutch: once, many years ago, I went to buy a pair of trousers. The one I selected and tried on was fine. As I was looking at the mirror, the salesman came along and nodded approvingly. "It seems alright" I confirmed. "Meneer, het is van Frans Molenaar" ("Sir, it is by FM") he said in a surprisingly touchy tone. I couldn't resist the joke: "Het spijt me, ik dacht dat het te koop was" ("Sorry, I thought it was for sale"). 

Potentially everything carries a label today. That's not the problem. The problem arises when labels become unquestioningly synonymous with high quality. We are into labels because we associate them with status, performance, exclusivity, belongingness - all kinds of aspirations and positive expectations. Our mobile phones are preferably iPhones, our clothes and shoes come from whichever brand is popular today (and may be bankrupt tomorrow). Labels are more than a name. They indicate something we routinely associate with high quality: design. Design goods cannot be produced anonymously, they have to carry a label. "Design" implies that the products are conceived, developed and manufactured with care and attention. They may be as mass produced as other goods, out of more or less the same parts and components, using the same techniques, but they are different. Design goods represent more than utility and performance, namely a desirable lifestyle. 

It's probably inevitable that architecture follows the same trend. Architecture is more and more about style than performance, functionality, social and environmental change, despite the causes that happen to be in vogue. As a consequence, it is often more important that a building carries a label, the name of a popular or respected architect, than it fulfils its goals and requirements. A good architect produces good buildings without any doubt. This means that architects produce design goods, that they are designers. 

This is "designers" in a different sense than the one Herbert Simon used to compare the activities and tasks of architects, lawyers and physicians. It refers to form and appearance rather than solution to a problem. So, I can say that my chair is a Stokke by Peter Opsvik, that in my neighbourhood there are buildings by Herman Hertzberger but I cannot say that my knee is by Jansen or that the crowns in my teeth are by Mulder, although the work done by both that orthopedic surgeon and that dentist are technically and artistically of the highest order. As a consumer, I'm keen to associate the thing with the designer; as a patient less so. 

Suffering in the building sector

Suffering in the building sector

Among the news of the day in the Netherlands: the building sector (I can't honestly call that shambles an industry) will suffer from the effects of the corona. Yawn: is there any crisis that doesn't affect the building sector in a profound way? How long will it take us (and especially the politicians) to realize that the building sector is unsound? One cannot rely on cheap labour and volume of activity for ever, and we shouldn't support them in prolonging the agony.

Buildings are a necessity, not a luxury. We'll always need them and hopefully always ask for improvements, either from an environmental or from an economic perspective. In other words, the built environment is full of promise and opportunity, and could become a stable sector that is not that sensitive to crises. You don't hear the super markets complain that much or that often because people need them daily. Are the buildings we use, also daily and moreover constantly, less important to our safety and wellbeing?

It's high time that the building sector accepts that it's in urgent need of reform; that they need new production methods and better organization. It is unacceptable that in the age of data and computation building projects cannot be completed within time and within budget. We're either failing to plan and organize them properly or producing in outdated, inadequate ways - most probably both. The main problem is that too many stakeholders and actors have to accept the need for change and do something about it. Given the complacency and conformism of most, I cannot help being pessimistic. Too much has to change and we haven't had the brain or the guts to start yet.