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| The Marriage of Stewart and Jesse. Posted on 11/10/2002. |
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My post on extending Jesse's elements of user experience, and assigning intervals of longevity, fired a connection to Stewart Brand's brilliant How Buildings Learn, wherein he identifies the 6 layers of buildings, all which happen to begin with S:  10 comments so far. Add a comment. Previous entry: "Art They Don't Want You To See." COMMENT #1 COMMENT #2 Sigh.
COMMENT #3 COMMENT #4 He uses a similar diagram for the "pacing of change" in the book "The Clock of the Long Now". From fast to slow: Each layer operates at its own pace. The faster layers innovate (top) and the slow layers stabilize.
COMMENT #5 "Faster": I'd buy *that* for a dollar! Ha!
COMMENT #6 Fandom, however, cannot make these observations operational, prescriptive, or descriptive. HBL is sophistry; yet I am not accusing Stewart of a knowing deception. In the least the foundation is faulty. If the claim were true, that some buildings learn ... it would remain more appropriate to point out that most buildings, most by looooong odds, do not learn. From which appropriate principles could be derived. However, because several of those principles would apply to each example in the book that approach would put in doubt the learning claim. The best would be, at best, remedial learners. Now in a very few instances, a tiny few exemplars may reveal a new way forward. The prerequisites are immense, however. One is paramount: the exemplars must be authentic in the principles the propose to reveal. This is most certainly not the case here. Gone askew are understandings of: the art and practice of architecture, the economic incentives of contracts, the practice of studying comparables (and detecting exception from norm) ... even to a basic misunderstanding of how economics actually unfold in time, and how time and time's agents influence economics. The shearing layers model is one such arbitrary and non-operational model. If it were labeled as fanciful, then it'd be fine. But it's advanced as operational, and even prescriptive. A single simple debunking suffices: the most permanent aspect of buildings (occupied, otherwise the model is void of at least two layers, among other defining considerations) is the stuff. Okay, a second, no stuff can exist without a space plan -- explicit or otherwise. And both survive the building, every building; all buildings. Transfering to IA/etc, this argues full-on that one should, first, invest heavily in creating and endowing value in that which audiences directly perceive value, availing oneself of each opportunity concerning the remainder. That's the true lesson brought home, btw, to at least one of the tortured occupants of the devilish Fort Cronkhite. And to every corporation that has invested heavily (in time lost, in $ throughout) in the 'idealized' infrastructure. Infrastructure is risk incarnate. That is, where adaptive architectures are required, more, not fewer, external options with overlapping (and disjoint) returns, timeframes and objective functions are required. Don't make a fetish of the "building," not for your sake, your direct constituenties, or the world at large. You're against odds that you'll be wrong. Okay, since you insist, a third, and crucial for separating this shearing layer model from any claim to guide IA or related practices: The overriding principle in active design is the avoidance/destruction of this segregation. Which may sound close to Mr. Brand's viewpoint (briefly: plan for learning) but is rather quite different: spend your really important planning time on other things -- a few simple principles will suffice regarding the infrastructure. For everybody's sake make the building expendible (to exaggerate a bit). Not merely ameniable to change (narrowly) "forseen" (retrospectively in HBL; in IA, the last client's still-persistent initial problems). Thinking of them (structure, etc) as the building is a fundamental error, one that permits other mistakes ... including opening the opportunity to the swooning apprentice to carry on about how a few buildings could be said to overcome some presumed error or another; more like substituting for that error another (now conveniently overlooked). Stuart (Henshall), I hope you don't mind that we leave the nonsense of the Long Now and the Fast-to-Slow for another time. Or just leave it. Suffice to say that I believe that something that changes continually yet is inconstant (and reversible) in effect, affect and impact (fashion) -- essentially stuck in a very tiny, narrow, phase loop -- is infinitely slower than something that is changing continually and is constant and practically irreversible in effect, affect and impact (Nature, say). Mr. Brand's error here is a repeat of that of HBL you'll notice -- a surface effect of speed or impermanance hides a more fundamental overriding principle, of opposite import. Innovation, our favorite common topic Stuart, is another matter, however, and I do look forward to our next discussion on that topic.
COMMENT #7 COMMENT #8 Be interested in views here. Is the smart room a retrograde concept and thus is a smart building a dumb idea? Ie empowering the buildings with smart dust a dangerous alley of monitoring and observance? Or alternatively is Mann's WearComp cyborg approach more appropriate to how we learn? Should intelligence be programmmed into buildings or decentralised down to the individual? Has wireless already proven the futility of hard wired? Should we be building dependent for learning or building independent, learning wherever we walk? Seems to me that it is the collective power that can be harnessed within the building and outside anytime that is more important. And yet personal freedoms can be impacted tomorrow regardless of whether the building or the person is enhanced. I doubt there is a fashion statement in that.
COMMENT #9 The point of the shearing layers is that features change at different rates depending on the nature of the feature's durability, technology, functionality, fashion. Isolating those things that change frequently from those things that are more stable is essential to the long-term viability of any entity: be it a building, an information system, or a biological organism.
COMMENT #10 The point of the shearing layers is that features change at different rates depending on the nature of the feature's durability, technology, functionality, fashion. Isolating those things that change frequently from those things that are more stable is essential to the long-term viability of any entity: be it a building, an information system, or a biological organism.
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