Comfortable tactical laziness
When I did my undergraduate thesis, the typical project was that PhD students developed a broad and complex thesis project. And depending on the piece of knowledge about where each person was, in my case bioclimatism, pieces emerged to explore supporting those themes; Junior theses.
My path towards science began. Actually my thesis is based on capturing and processing hundreds of thousands of data in Excel. At first it was very disappointing. I thought it was going to provide a great find for architecture, and I actually had to organize and tabulate the data for months. I was so lazy that it made me get creative and look for a method to do this automatically. I had the right program for it, Excel, although it may not be very attractive to an architect, but we must not forget that it is a very robust and versatile program. So I started researching formulas, processes, designing flow.
In the third week, I ran an automated csv file import process that flagged and highlighted data of particular interest, organizing everything perfectly into Excel format in less than two seconds per file. In the end, it wasn't the superiority or sophistication of the computer I had; Only mine The advantage was that I was tactically lazy.
Repetitive tasks are (or should be) at risk of extinction.
When AutoCAD became a tool for the general architect, architecture schools offered resistance in various ways. Because the „art” of architecture is going to die, because a photo-realistic render is never more beautiful than a wonderful watercolor perspective. It is completely unjustified terrorism. AutoCAD only suppressed repetitive tasks like my Excel algorithm. He made us more precise and more productive architects, setting the table for architecture as a reliable and efficient investment vehicle for the real estate industry.
Scientific thinking forces you to always think that there is a more efficient way to do something that we find boring because our work Professionals, architects, researchers and professionals, it should not be mainly functional, but mainly creative and scientific. To do that, you need to remove repetitive tasks from the brain, which ultimately take linear time. You can only draw one plane at a time, but you can think of multiple ways to solve the position of a face at a time.
Explaining a condition to the design team is the same. One can create dozens of 2D views to illustrate a complex situation, and architects, designers, structural engineers, and real estate developers will continue to be dissatisfied because it is not clear. And each of them will ask for more and more information which they know will be useful to understand what we propose; So after a long time, after many drawings, friction and frustration our solution proposal will be accepted. What would have happened if it had taken more time to develop the Augmented Reality model from scratch, and if everyone had explored the model and accepted it with the joy of quickly understanding it in one meeting? In this case, the repetitive tasks are eliminated, the drawings, although they are automated, are not limited to documenting them using technology to communicate them.
At the limits of experience, the purpose of simulation begins
At this stage of technology, I believe there are two types of motorists, on the one hand, those who drive to their jobs every day following memory routes traveled over years; and on the other hand, Even going to the corner store, their cell phone's GPS. This is a clear case of technology combating FOMO (fear of missing out). While driving purely based on experience, we always have doubts about whether the „other” road was better, GPS technology can analyze multiple scenes at once and know with sufficient accuracy what is happening on all the roads we know. And many more that we don't know.
This is the contribution we make at The Facade Studio, where we have been able to reach tables where larger firms of designers, installers and real estate developers who have built more buildings than us have worked for more years. Over-reliance on experience is directly opposed to scientific thinking, but we must understand that we cannot reach the tables of the elders only by fanciful stories or the desire to talk. Hard and well-thought-out data must be presented.
Our mission is to combat a real estate developer's FOMO At Facade Studio, „What would have happened if something else had been specified?” To clarify the doubts, we use the technique to analyze a large number of combinations of facade material specification probabilities.
Experience is retrospective linear knowledge based on memory and recognition of known patterns. The future is endless possibilities based on small decisions we may or may not make. With the aim of using technology to analyze possible future scenarios; Experience enables us to refine and extract the most absurd and most improbable alternatives, and the scenarios to be simulated are affordable and plausible. This way we will get direct meaningful data which will be perceived as real.
A grown man
In the 90s, the term humanism was coined as a way to define a celebrated philosophical and ideological group. and promotes the inextricable fusion of man with technology. Like any worthwhile idea, it has ardent promoters and aggressive detractors.
But what I really wanted to think about was whether we were a „prehistoric” example of an evolved human or subhuman. Today there are chips that can be implanted in the brain that can significantly correct Parkinson's. There are robotic extensions of the doctor's movements that remove cancerous tissue with unimaginable precision and give you dozens of extra lives. Aren't we already enjoying convergence with technology?
But what would “homo-sanborns” be if one day we were left without a smartphone; or a week. My work life, my personal life, my hobbies, my bank accounts, my ability to get around town, my ability to quickly explore what dehumanization means; Everything in my daily life depends on an extension of my body called smartphone.
And our companies? If they turn off the electric switch on any Tuesday; Well, we sent all the architects home. It makes no sense to work without computers, without high-speed Internet, without instant synchronization of information.
My point is that our dependence on high technology is undeniable. We enjoy a life tightly bound to the fragility of electricity and instant communication networks. It is somewhat absurd to fear technology, because our condition already depends on its existence and its rapid evolution.
Perhaps the fear is more social than practical. There may be a fear that those with more resources are highly altered human beings and are beyond the reach of someone who can't afford their intraocular augmented reality lenses, (for example). But perhaps, paradoxically, an intelligent agency free of moral conflicts or emotional impulses should be allowed to control certain things.
Artificial intelligence. „Zion, listen to me!”
On the planet, we all fear to some extent the future of AI (Artificial Intelligence), how it creates works of visual art, songs that go viral in seconds, And pop producers are shaking in fear of losing their jobs; We architects see how projects are created with two or three impulses, although it is difficult for us to accept it, good, cheap and fast.
Let us not fear. This has happened many times before, and each time, jobs are lost, productivity increases a lot, production costs go down, and the availability of goods and services increases. Today we have drugs that are mass produced with automated and standardized procedures, which in the 1800s was a terrible problem due to the unemployment that industrial automation would create. We had the advent of AutoCAD and BIM and other tools, which became the horror of many architects Outdated people who lost their jobs. It is absurd and comical that today the airport is designed in 2D and drawn on Albanian paper and ink plans.
We have to agree with technology. Understand what it is. It's not artificial intelligence, it's artificial intelligence. So, like any paradigmatic technological advance, it will be a cruel destroyer of the ongoing task of data interpolation that creates popular and predictable content. And it will speed up the production of bold projects with less probability of failure. If it's a new revolution, it's no small thing, it will redefine business and processes, but those that survive will be the most efficient.
At Facade Studio we have always been a proponent of the use and generation of innovative technologies, without fear, are they going to outshine us? Well of course. That is why we love them, but we are all slaves to our virtues. We have the power to create things out of our „strategic laziness”; The ability to do more with less effort every time; And the irony is that it becomes a cycle, forcing us to adapt to the consequences of our own actions. But the only thing we've done since we started walking upright: adjust. It is attractive that we assign „intelligence” to an entity that is not reactive to emotions and is pure and trustworthy.
We currently operate several tools based on artificial intelligence, In self-purifying evolutionary practices, we don't feel our jobs are at riskBut it accelerates the process with better architecture, better facades, faster, more economical for our customers and more profitable for us.
This is an article from Edition 142 https://inmobiliare.com/digital/INMOBILIARE-142.pdf.
*Editor's Note: The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the editor and do not necessarily reflect the position of Inmobiliare.