What is wrong with this picture?
Firstly lets touch on the style of this writing. Part of my hesitation (some may say procrastination) has been tied up in the thought of formalising things into an academic paper or something of equal banality. As the subject matter of the study deals closely with the deficit of recorded informal communication within the process of architecture, it just seemed a little weird to start off by formalising the concept in a rigid paper. That is not say there is not a place for formal coalition of these musings into a concise body of work, it is just that I feel this process needs to happen once the concepts are out there and the concrete has begun to harden.Secondly I would like to see how this works online with comments rather than working on paper and pen. I am still going to print these things out and pin them up where you see them but this should be seen more as a post-it reminder than the 'informal' submission. The reasons for this goes back to the concept as it seems rather two-faced to propose informal digital collaboration and then flesh it out using printed documents and discussions held behind closed doors. I should also make things easier for me to do numerous blocks of discussion rather than commit (and potentially loose) too much time to a single endeavor.
On the subject informal conversation to give a background of what I keep track of here's a link to my current RSS subscriptions in OPML format. Most RSS aggregators import OPML, on Windows I would recommend RSSReader (http://www.rssreader.com/) whilst on OSX there's my favourite NetnewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/). At the very least you should probably checkout Doc Searls' site (http://doc.weblogs.com/) and the Technorati blog search engine (http://www.technorati.com/). The mechanics behind Technorati are pretty amazing when you consider how up to date the content is and how active many of the conversations are.
Why am I here?
This is a pretty important question and one for a while I did not know how to answer. It was a bit like waking up one morning on a cruise ship with an all you can eat buffet and a destination many years away. Whilst limited by the constraints of the ship I have had the opportunity to take some risks and do some pretty cool things. Not many people have the financial freedom to dip their feet in the water of running their own business knowing that if things turn bad they can always retreat back to their PhD. Over the last two years since I learnt I had the scholarship I have been contracted by a number of different organisations both within and outside the confines of the architecture community. These mixed experiences have helped to clarify a number of issues related to the why dilemma.Firstly I like the challenges of digital communication forcing people to work closer together. Before the Internet there was a lot of barriers (both physical and otherwise) between people that we as a culture had built up to protect and serve us. Media was controlled by a select few, the list of people you could talk to was limited by your phonebook and to solve a problem the first place you'd go would be the bookshelf. In this new arena I enjoy hearing what Doc Searls has to say. He and his compatriots put forward a lot of ideas about contemporary Internet business in the Cluetrain Manifesto that I agree with. There is still the question of how these concepts sit in the AEC arena, sure email has replaced the letter and to a limited extent the fax, but is there a discernible change in the way the process of architecture is conducted in the digital realm?
The Internet is the new frontier and this gets me excited. It seems like every month there is a new craze or 'next big thing', Google's stock price keeps going up and my RSS aggregator (an application genre that did not exist a few years ago) gets filled with new articles in just a matter of hours. The fact that most of these crazes flop, Google's business plan is shaky and the majority of news articles are chaff does not bother me in the slightest; I am attracted to the energy that emanates from this industry in a manner that hasn't occurred in the AEC sector since Le Corbusier thought white walls and reinforced concrete might make it big with the rich folk.
It is great when simple, loosely joined things work together to solve complex problems. Too often in any endeavor, but especially in the IT arena, complex solutions are offered to solve difficult problems. Most of these solutions work out okay but the truly great solutions are the ones that are so simple (almost) anyone can understand. The Web is the perfect example of this, but I think Tim Berners-Lee hit on it through luck rather than astute reasoning (more on that later).
In the real world I had an example occur to me this week. A year ago I helped put a Netware server in for a local architecture practice. The decision was based on the fact the administrator of the server was proficient in Netware and it is a robust system used in really large organisations. Providing a system that met the requirements of the practice turned out to be very difficult. Netware is a very complex system with a lot of moving parts on the server and client. It means in large scale situations administrators have a lot of control, and control in a large organisation is a very important thing. In this situation lots of moving parts meant lots of problems and eventually on Wednesday the whole system crashed. Fortunately like a volcano getting ready to erupt it had sent enough danger signs out the previous week that the data was backed up and the users were prepared for the worst. Unfortunately it meant I lost a good many days picking up the pieces.
Someone once said the sign of a stupid person is someone who repeats their past mistakes. I did not want to fall for this trap as the smell of a lawsuit is not particularly nice. Netware was out and along with it all its complexities. What is now in place is so simple its almost beautiful and everything is modular so that one failure cannot bring down the entire network. Even better the simple solution is understood by the users which even at this early stage has helped instill a lot more faith than the past system ever had.
What is the moral of this story? Small, low-resource architecture practices throw up just as many problems as large organisations (they just look different and you have less time to solve them). Consequently if you are going to propose something for this environment it has to be simple, it has to work right off the bat and users need to understand the processes behind it so that they can trust what is going on.
Right then, so what's your problem?
I am disgruntled and yet at the same time drawn in by the disjointed nature of the architecture process. I find it fascinating how so many people from different backgrounds can pull themselves together to work on a project and then within an instant disband and go and form other project groups elsewhere (or at the same time). You would think the communications channels for this would be extremely complex and technologically sophisticated but in most cases they are not. What does annoy me is the thought of all the knowledge that evaporates during this project as requirements are communicated, concepts proposed, decisions documented, the structure built and finally inhabited by users completely foreign to the whole process. But in saying this it is not just a case of subscribing to the notion that if every single piece of information was recorded throughout the building life-cycle then everyone would be better off. I think that was a nice concept in during the 1990's when the Internet was just coming to the fore and the idea that any piece of data could be 'managed' was all the rage (Refer: 'The Nonsense of Knowledge Management'). In the real world we were soon overcome by too much data and not enough usable knowledge as Google demonstrates to us daily (a search for 'New Zealand timber frame wall' tonight produced 112,000 results).It was in this environment that Tim Berners-Lee published his second concept of the Semantic Web (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/12/xml2000/timbl.html). This is where I think he demonstrated his 'fathering' of the contemporary Web was more by accident than purpose. The Semantic Web demonstrates none of the underlying simplicity of the current Web; it is reliant on complex protocols, super intelligent 'bots' and a world where everyone is in agreement and trusts each other. In this environment HTML evolved into XML and was to form the common glue that would bind the new Web. XML in many respects is a step backwards from HTML, and whilst grammar is formalised the document itself contains less semantics than its predecessor.
I have to go to bed now, I have been working on things since 5:00am and its now 11:30pm. There is a few things I need to see to in the morning but by lunch I should be back writing. Rather than adding onto this posting I will start a new entry going further into what I would like to produce (a.k.a 'my cool thing').