decision making

graphics

Sustainability

In our field, as in many others, we use this term. It gets regurgitated in our discussions and sanctified through political endorsement. Sustainability is a safe word. It implies we don't need to change, we just need to make sure we don't necessitate change by forcing the acknowledgment of our own wastefulness. This language is terrible, and is so for strategic purposes.
Suppose we choose a new word. Rather than sustainable, perhaps it is the attainable that we should be aiming for in our design choices. This language imposes a trajectory of change. We are not trying to sustain a status quo, we're invoking a newly defined relationship to our environment.

Old News?

Incomplete Manifesto

Map of facebook

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-the-us.html

Visual Thesaurus

I mentioned this a while ago in class and wanted to be sure you can all take a look. You can only do a few searches before they start asking you to subscribe, but it's really beautiful while it lasts.

Visual Thesaurus

WolframAlpha

Here is an example of how WolframAlpha can be used to compare information, in this example, comparing species. The last image on the page is a map of the information that can be shown as a tree or a network.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=puma,+lion,+red+fox

Here it is as a network:

Hamlet as a Facebook news feed

I don't know if you all have seen this before, but I think it is one of the greatest things inspired by Facebook, next to Scramble :)

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2008/7/30schmelling.html

Carbon footprint of Google search

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134.ece

I'm glad manifesto's can be in list form.

Design sets an example.
Restructuring our own values begins a greater discussion.

Design with the life cycle in mind.
This includes everything from trees, to bricks, to hardware and software.

Understand the carbon footprint of the Google search.

Good infrastructure is flexible.
In this instance, flexibility means being able to anticipate and plan for known changes and tactfully adapt when surprises occur.

Expect the unexpected.
I don’t really how to elaborate on this but it sounded cool.

Nobody benefits from hoarding.
Too much information begets too many resources devoted to that housing that information.

Privatization and exclusivity decreases productivity and progress.
The immaterial economy is upon us. Sharing [ideas, immaterial knowledge, codes, images] helps us all.

Technology alone will not save us.
Real change challenges existing institutions.

Re-instate the Common(s) as a resource and a product.
If the model can flourish online, it can be reinstated on the ground and in our planning policies.

Get political. We are the least involved generation politically speaking since it has been recorded.

Our designs do not stop at their physical manifestations.
Just as carefully as we craft our buildings, streets, plazas, and institutions, we must consider crafting the digital infrastructure, and a corresponding language, which supports and interacts with them.

We are where our attention is.
But – the body is still situated in time and space. Understanding this relationship is crucial.

The dignity of making things is important to our [human] livelihood.
Our ability to make art is a strictly human tradition. Take craft seriously. Beauty and use still have a place in a time of algorithmic design.

PS this is a draft :)

Draft Manifesto

With the incessant pull on the human mind toward the virtual it is the architect’s responsibility to ground their work in the physical. While information may be incorporeal and instantaneous, those who access it are still tied to bodies, environment and place. In acknowledging that which is physical we can advance along with technology. Light, air, temperature, sound, touch are the materials with which we must work. It is these that ground the body and mind within the physical world while supporting their forays into the digital.

Similarly, technology thus far must still inhabit a physical body in order to support its reach. These bodies – computers, servers, digital devices – are also grounded in their physical needs. To design for technology we must answer to these physical needs in order to provide space that will withstand evolution.

Class Manifesto

Historically, we have always had questions, fears, and doubts about infrastructure and technology.

Architecture and technology are mutually inclusive terms. If architecture is a form of technology then it is not immune to technological advances.

Information technology has not outmoded architecture. It is adding another layer to architecture’s role as mediator between people and the environment.

The internet and related IT devices reinforce individualism while at the same time present new means and speed of communication, much like the highway did in the past.

Personal connectivity conveys a heightened degree of power, freedom, participation, familiarity/comfort, and safety to the individual.

As designers, we hold a determined level of control over program in our designs.

A whole environment, such as a city, can be seen as a set of interfaces at different scales. As designers, we can optimize those human-physical/environmental-digital interfaces.

As we move into the future, our designs need to include more hardware capacity than necessary to avoid swiftly becoming obsolescent. We define hardware in very broad terms.

We will resist inherent obsolescence by building- in multiple functions.

We have the ability to design-in responsible usage; part of this is designing from a whole system approach.

The Takeaway: Obama's Budget, The Week's Agenda; Terror Trial Move; Haiti Update; Dave Barry - The Takeaway

The Takeaway: Obama's Budget, The Week's Agenda; Terror Trial Move; Haiti Update; Dave Barry - The Takeaway

Eddie Bernays Teaser

Century of Self

Technology from a theological perspective

An interview with Wired magazine's co-founder, Kevin Kelly.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5227

New Industry Revolution

Here is the article Maren mentioned last week. It's worth reading!

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution

Manifesto

Every invention, every innovation… every solution posed by those preceding this time has raised more questions and produced more problems than the ones to which they were designed in response. Of course, every solution we in this coming information age propose will naturally perform likewise. The extent to which we can minimize the shortcomings in design will be measured by our attempt at solving for as many variables as can be recognized. We can no longer only ask ourselves how something could be done, but had better be ready to ask whether something should be done. Every generation is born into the luxury of hindsight; and we know that we could do most anything we suppose is possible, but have already done a great many things that should never have been accomplished. Or, if that accomplishment serves its immediate purpose, some immediate good, it inevitably becomes the burden of some succeeding condition. With the technologies we use we could do great and terrible things, but to say we should do something is to introduce to the process of design a moral imperative. It will be that moral imperative that sensitizes us to all those variables that in recognition of which we will produce solutions of both broadly versatile conception and modestly specific, local actualization.
We will restrain ourselves. While the temptation is to cram the latest novelties into every design, we must re-evaluate the basis of need. We must consider the life-cycles of our products, obsolescence, and the continued use of resources after its intended function is no longer supported.
We will remember that invention is not creation, and that creative design is the displacement of material. The displacement of material is either the forcible disruption of natural equilibrium, or the necessary release of stress. We must ask what the intended environment needs and what it produces, what the proposed product needs and what it produces, and how the two entities can be paired to complement one another.
We will understand expression as inexorable flatulence due to the digestion of experience. It is neither rational nor reducible. It is as needless as music and as natural as gravity. We will honor that dynamic in at least these two ways: 1) For too long our notion of expression has relied upon the purchase and possession of goods; a notion sold to us in the interest of commerce. A new paradigm should be realized in which expression is no more than a communicative and behavioral interpretation of experience. The foremost objective for any designer is the enrichment of experience for the purpose of encouraging expression. 2) We will promote no programs that seek to misappropriate information technology or the means of communication public and private for the purpose of repressing, surveying, exploiting, or corrupting the liberty and sanctity of human expression.
We plink and sputter. Behind every technologically advanced appendage we can invent is the soft flesh and bone that orchestrates its movements. We design for the flesh and bone not for the advanced appendage. We will endeavor to remain grounded in our respect for the human condition and resist romanticizing the fetishes of industry and technology.
We will be responsive, not resolute. When our fellow citizens insist on behaving otherwise, our response will be resistance. It is our fundamental responsibility to question popular convention regardless of political climate, the answers we accumulate inform our actions for or against popular opinion.