Computers are useless – they can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso
During the recent lecture, Alan Badiou said that true revolution is not finding a new answer to the old question, true revolution is finding a new question…
(this is the link to the text on last year’s (2014 lectures) that covered some of the overarching themes for Badiou, mostly the subject of the Real and the actualized impossibility ( .. of, if I might add, … the true new).)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/alain-badiou-southern-california-politics-impossible
Due to recent development of technology (of construction, visualization, simulation) we are getting closer to start asking a new question : What do you want from architecture?
This sounds very much like an old question: what do I mean when I say what do you want? – what could one want? – shelter, protection, environment… Well there is, I believe, a trick for The New question, buried inside of the new relationship with machinery ( if you would indulge me please)
Let’s look at our relationship with technology – space where architecture, as discipline is presented as part of the technology of society; and let’s look at it on the example of the one of the oldest pieces of technology besides the wheel, fire, masonry( and 🙂 architecture)… time keeping – instantiated in a form of an object: clock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock
Results of the ingenious succession of improvements, over a loooong period of time, clocks reduced in the size from the days of the water clocks (clepsydra) a tower like structure to something eventually slightly smaller and finally personal -wall size, table size and then even pocket size and wrist size.
A personal object.
Ok, so now everyone has a “time-piece” and we all live happily ever after… Well that is not the story..
The story is in the relationship with the machine interface – the clock. The long history is there only to explain how do we have a complex, abstract system of representation for telling time.
When you look at the face of the clock (and you are hopefully older than about 5) the relationship of the two handles tell you the time. Now, for the full view of the subject of time, you still have to deduce if it means 9:00 am morning or 9:00pm night and on some winter days in some parts of the world – I had a problem figuring it out just by looking out of the window (think jetlagged in Moscow winter).
So here I would like to put emphasis on the process of obtaining the skill to tell time: ability to understand relationships of two handles, figuring out how the information of their thickness factors in – or not, or how their length and speed play a role – it’s a long process. If you have been teaching a young child to tell time, you know that it takes months of work until they get it, or if you have been trying to write a object recognition piece of software that would be able to recognize a clock and tell time .
Well there is the core of my story: so far machines and technology required, in many cases, years of training.
Driving a car still requires training, it’s no longer reserved only for the professionals like in the beginning (though there are still professionals whose job is to drive), but it still takes about a year to be “a driver”….
Even in the everyday small electronic or kitchen mechanical/electrical devices usually include at least a manual, that should tell you how to operate a blender.
My point is that need for the manual or training is not because of small electronic complexity, its exactly because they are lacking in complexity. If you compare electro/mechanical devices that do not have computational processing that regulate behavior: interactions of humans and objects, you will find that it was always guided on the position of – humans learning to use the tool, until the tool becomes a “part of them”.. Just as a reference: Heidegger and use of tools…
Well – going back to the question of abstract representation of time in the nature of the analog clock interface – for the first time, due to advances in technology, we are getting to pose a whole new question: “what is a clock?” in the relationship of : “what do we want from the clock?”.
Let’s look at examples:
It should tell time:
but it should also warn me that the time of my meeting is coming up, because i need information on overall time mostly in a relationship to my activities, and adjustment of my personal time to be able relate to other peoples time.
So what do I want from a clock is:
– when do I have to leave “to be there in time”
-wake me up
-how long was i running – (please say that it was enough)
– do I have time for quick shower before guests arrive
Most of the calculation I can do myself: if quest are coming at 7:30 and its now 7, I’ll have plenty of time for a shower (plenty being my fully personal judgment – my plenty is someone else’s tight)….
More importantly:
How do we design that clock?
Recent examples of “wake me up” clock are not clock-like at all. Some of the work on emitting the light of a particular wave length, and color of that light talks to out lower parts of the brain that its’ morning time, wakey-wakey…
Or, like some of digital assistants, they tell you the time using human synthesized voice at the point when you address them.
Design of intelligent objects now has a component of variable behavior that was not a part of electro/mechanical devices universe, that relied on singular behavior, for example: blender chops in several speeds, but still just chops, and juicer juices, it does not adjust its responses based on the type of fruit or vegetable that you might be inserting.
In a similar manner a living room is just there, it doesn’t adjust because you have guests arriving.
With some small steps we are starting to see the possibilities for the elements of the living room obtaining a behavior, like lights turning on or off based on your presence in the room or particular part of the room, something that might be characterized as awareness behavior on the part of the lights.
As we move deeper in the “age of Context”-(R Scoble book), contextual awareness in the everyday objects will influence how we design them, focusing on the question: What do we want form them. (meaning how do we want them to behave so that we do not have to adjust to them).
I do not know the answer, but I’m trying to ask a new question: what do we want from architecture , or at this point its parts, components, smaller systems, so that it understands Us (understand Me) and our needs, augmenting – as technology should do, and not diverting experiences, because of the impotence of the technology..
Natasha Bajc 