Imagine a written page where it was possible that only some words were visible. And the arrangement of those visible words told their own story. Now imagine those words disappeared while yet others appeared. Another story entirely. What fun would that be? And now imagine four separate stories made from the same page of words flickering on and off. Then when they were all displayed, it was a passage from the greatest novel you ever read.
This is daily life in the mad land of architects and their drawings.
Buildings, like cars, airplanes, people and ogres are composed of layers of systems interacting to make something unlike any of the constituent parts. As a design practice, the deliberate arranging of systems that interact to make a building are constructed in sequence. We move from the abstract requests of our clients to the exacting locations of rafters, insulation and light switches. And we do it in the mysterious zeroes and ones of computers.
Imagine you can draw a building with a pencil. You don’t need to a lot of precision to make that drawing. We all know how to get the idea across Pictionary style. I have been made extensive fun at parties because my drawings are just as improvisational as the next persons. “Thought you could draw Ebbert! What is that!”
Yes, yes.
But now, try this on a computer. The level of precision you need is outrageous. In drafting class, old school, where we taped paper to drawing boards and used triangles and rulers and pencils and compasses, it did require some skill. But it was ninth and tenth grade math combined with some eye hand coordination and a handful of well crafted tools. Not so on a computer. You need to know how to write a page of words so that it tells five stories.
By the time you figure this out, anyone who walks into your world and challenges you on this had better be ready for a fist fight. Seriously. What we learn in this method of learning gets ingrained in a deep emotional trench of endless confusion, frustration, fighting learned helplessness of unsolvable problems, and final triumph when we understand it. We become attached to this kind of knowledge, even when it simply doesn’t serve us.
And this is what it’s like when you tell someone there is an easier way to accomplish the same outcome.
Which is probably my leading theory of why we continue to use technologies that are poisoning our wells.
And though I have about 10% of factual information to work with, as long as this is a viable theory, I will continue to remind myself, and maybe you too, that there are, in fact, things we can change. It doesn’t take courage to change them. It takes courage to recognize we can change them.