architecture

"Frank Duffy's layering of buildings into Site-Structure-Skin-Services-Space-plan-and-Stuff"


"What are we to make of all this apparent fraudulence? As a boat lover I remember when fiberglass boats first came along in the 1950s, and everyone said they would never work, never sell, never last. Wrong on every count. Fiberglass boats are lighter and stronger than wood, more intricately shaped, and they endure negligent owners, which wood cannot, because they are immune to teredo worms, dry rot, and baking sun. Fiberglass never leaks; wood always does, top and bottom. And yet a magazine called Woodenboat, founded in 1969, became one of the all-time publishing successes through worshipping the virtues of wood in boats. Those virtues consist entirely of the aesthetics of tradition and the discipline of managing a short-lived material. I have owned and sold an excellent plastic boat and owned and kept a troublesome wooden boat. Why? The Wood feels better, and I can fiddle with it. But if I really had to sail somewhere, I'd get fiberglass or steel."


from Stewart Brand in his 1994 'How Buildings Learn'

The Third Culture and The Edge

"The strength of the third culture is precisely that it can tolerate disagreements about which ideas are to be taken seriously. "

http://www.edge.org/about_edge.html

synonyms by culture

Surely there is a crowdsourced thesaurus and dictionary (thought it's reprehensible that the major ones - dictionary.reference.com - don't allow it) - and I'll assume that somebody can apply the best practices in filtering/judging entries. But we need a way to divide/distinguish and then visualize/represent the changes in our language over time and by geographic boundaries. Even more: by culture, profession, or interest type.

For instance: reframe, innovation, design
mean vastly different things (which is at least kinda addressed in good dictionaries), and these distinctions aren't addressed at all in thesaurusi.

self-direction

Moving quickly towards the top of the to-do list (from somewhere around #1000 when I first thought of it months ago): apply an insight matrix to my own interests, knowledge, and experiences.

This is in pursuit of narrowing down my focus from everything to a couple key points - in the process I'd probably stumble across a bonus new/different formulation of what design is about or where it's headed.

software observations

Why don't restaurant point of sale devices support dividing bills for large parties? for that matter, why not get them to use a handheld device to allow the server to do it at the table?

Then, I found myself pressing ctrl+g to search for a highlighted term in google - this is a great feature that I was pleased to stumble on in firefox (right click a highlighted word) - though it's still missing 'define'. What would it take to have the program recognize that I use that command frequently and guess that it's what I wanted to effect?

project management

Among my favorite topics is the abstraction called 'meta', or 'recursion', and sometimes characterized by 'levels of abstraction'. I am sometimes suspicious that most people aren't aware of it, or at least don't care about it. That's probably because most of the time I think individuals or groups are addressing it specifically and primarily, leading me to throw out something that has the same relationship to another part of the discussion - and usually to get a response which is either a very short meditation on the Koan I've offered or an awkward silence.

To be a little more specific: if a is meta to b, then b is a part of a ('part' could also be 'contained by', 'defined by', 'child', 'branch', 'aspect', 'dimension'). This is immensely confusing because there is no standard about whether or not this relationship is communicative - that is, whether you can switch a and b and still use the word 'meta'.

Demonstration: What is the relationship between A)'Strategy' and B)'Tactics'?
1. A is higher-level than B.
2. A is lower-level than B.
3. A is an overarching concept encompassing B and other concepts.
4. A is an underlying concept at the root of B and other concepts.

After much study, I believe that the relationship it is communicative (non-directional), but that nobody recognizes this. Thanks to Lakoff for helping me to see: this is because our representations of the relationship all rely on spatial metaphors (which is inherently directional for humans, unless you're an astronaut).

Examples: Christopher Alexander's model of abstraction in the design process shows direct learning of how to build a house - i.e. by watching someone and helping them - closer to the top of the printed page than mediated house design - i.e. architectural plans - which is higher again than reflective design - i.e. critiquing a plan as a drawing, as a physical and visible object.
The Christian model of 'infinity', 'eternity', and 'truth' as being way up in the sky, beyond the clouds.
When someone is talking about principles, attributes, or concepts which are unfamiliar or foreign - and thus not linked to anything tangible in the listener's experience - (i.e. 'innovation', 'collaboration', 'utopia', or 'e to the pi i plus one equals zero'), one might say the speaker 'has his head in the clouds'.
When someone speaks of familiar principles that the listener has, time and again, heard associated with particular events and environments (for my father - and thus for me - theses are values like 'a good, hard day's work', 'the value of a dollar', 'quality', and 'power'), the speaker is described as 'having his/her feet on the ground,' and their pronouncements are 'fundamental truths'.

This exploration of metaphors and language lends itself to a thousand tantalizing tangents, but I'm most interested in how the principles, groups, and relationships that are so important to one person are routinely presented and represented ass-backwards to another person. And I don't mean just that they're talking about different levels - one about a strategy and the other about a tactic - but that one person is imagining to move in the direction of bigger, longer-term, more all-encompassing strategies, and the other person is imagining to move in the direction of more concrete, immediate, actionable specifics - and they both describe the next phase of planning as 'strategy'.

With a clearer understanding of the commutability of 'meta', we can work out a standard which will help rectify this.

There were other examples of this phenomenon from class today, but I have to get ready for class tomorrow!

decoupling intuitive relations from complex calculations in mathematics education

Got my hair cut by a european lady with an advanced degree in mathematics this morning, and we managed to find a lot to agree about but it seems I need to work on this idea about a new conception of what math is and how to teach it. On the one hand, as she pointed out, you can't enjoy the power and fluency of a skill unless you practice it, repeating over and over, training yourself and ingraining it where you no longer struggle with the basic parts. On the other hand, there are lots of ways to use logic inside a structured rubric which don't involve numbers, such as the design methods I'm learning about at ID.
Between those two extremes of mathy versus non-mathy logical tools, there are many useful frameworks that are already part of the standard conception of mathematics, yet which don't require full fluency with numeric calculations to understand. As evidence I submit the popularizations of quantum and theoretical physics by many practicing physicists like Stephen Hawking, Murray Gell-Man and Michio Kaku, as well as accessible (if heavy) explanations of underlying/overarching themes in other mathematics-heavy disciplines like Hofstaedter's 'Godel, Escher, Bach' in computer science and 'The World is Flat' in economics.
Yet to my knowledge, no one has popularized any pieces of advanced mathematics so. Doing so could facilitate the reader's ability to see the world in such a way that quadratic equations and derivatives are relevant. I'm currently reading 'fooled by randomness' by Nicolas Tassim Taleb, which comes fairly close to doing this by relating a lot of powerful vignettes where reality fails to conform to some of the basic tenets of statistics and economics. I think he doesn't achieve what I'm describing only because the book is focused so heavily on the financial industry that the broader application is only vaguely suggested. It's also not a great introduction to the principles involved because it is essentially demonstrating Godel's assertion (perhaps when I finish reading I will be able to say whether it's a derivative or variation thereof?), which is all about what you can't do with mathematics. Perhaps there's a way to turn Godel's theorem inside out so that it's about what you *can* do with mathematics?

Here are the parts of mathematics that seem to me to have relevance outside of numbers-intensive disciplines:
- set theory, which is about groups and their relationships (especially container/contained and identity/collection). Has applications in systems theory, could be exemplified through stories about societies and looking at emergence.
- Boolean and Bayesian logic, which are about alternatives, decision making, or branching structures. Could be exemplified through stories about management, flow of goods, and control structures (which is another way to say flow of information?).

wiki visual

Apeksha and I were talking the other day about user interface, and (thoroughly indirectly) came up with the idea that a google search should include - in part at least - a visual breakdown of the general areas that are associated with the term you're searching, so that you can know at once how to get a decent overview of the topic.

The problem with this shares a common root with the problem of natural language processing and with artificial intelligence (at least on cursory examination), which basically means that to implement it we have to have humans construct the list of categories by hand for every search. Thankfully this has already been done to a large extent by wikipedia!

Not two hours later, I read in Fast Company that some people have already been working on visualizing wikipedia... but after a quick google search it looks like they're all concerned with visualizing the whole thing. Here's a collection that is (again after cursory search - let me know if you find different) representative:
http://www.scimaps.org/maps/wikipedia/

Understanding the structure of human knowledge in general is great, and some of these people have made it visually compelling too, but it looks like nobody has put this idea into a particular context, so here's a quick sketch of the idea:




So while I was making that sketc, I was thinking, 'surely this quick sketch wouldn't blow their minds over at google - there has to be somebody there who's thought of this and prototyped it a little more thoroughly than me...' And yep, sure enough they have. Go to 'show options' on the results page, and then click 'wonder wheel' towards the bottom of the list, and you'll see something like this:




It looks to be basically what we were thinking of, requires a little more research to determine if basing it on wikipedia would be more useful, robust, etc.

the new planning

I came to ID thinking that Design and Planning still operated like in the 50s, setting out a five year plan or a grand vision of a shiny future. I'm finding that there's a different kind of big-picture, a model of the world that doesn't break down due to new information but adapts to it, that doesn't rely on a rigid, linear set of goals but rather sets out a bundle of densely interconnected questions to be explored, and that accelerates its progress as more people with more different viewpoints want to join the party. I'm hoping to find a career creating tools to help others understand and use these principles.