Week 02: Personal Reading Reviews/Memos

Jay Huh
Jay Huh
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read

Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built, Ch. 1–2 (“Flow” and “Shearing Layers”)

“Buildings rule us via their time layering at least as much as we rule them.”

I took Space Design classes when I was an undergraduate student, which was part of my mandatory design curriculum. It gave me a chance to experience several spacial related projects; among them, ‘Design Department Redesigning’ was the most interesting project for me. We, team members and I, observed and analyzed how the building makes relationship with surroundings and its users; design students, visitors, and even passengers who just pass by our building. People usually get used to space where they stay, but their conformity is not unlimited; they try to innovate their place when conflict exceeds it. That might be one of the reasons why these kinds of projects are brought to classes, even though the department has not enough fund to rebuild the whole building.

This experience made me to enjoy reading the book of Stewart Brand. The sentences made my abstract thinking from my project into understandable and concrete concepts. The most important factor that most people, even designers or architects, fail to consider is time. Everything is dominated under the rule of time and that’s why everything changes.

Building can be called a type of product; a huge product. Just like every product, building has users. Just like every product, users shape building and building shapes users. It was excited to explore how the author analyzed the interaction between building and its users. Building will be layered into divided parts; Site-Structure-Skin-Service-Space Plan-Stuff(-Soul). They have different time scale and they influence each other. Most interaction is made from slow changers to quick changers; the slow constrains/controls the quick. However, the quick sometimes effect on the slow. The changes between them happen through out periods which bring adaptation. Not all adaptation means being better. Sometimes it goes backwards. The crucial point is how to make adaptation favorable to its users.

I believe this aspect is similar to our lives. Life is continuous problem solving, or question answering. We live, not because we expect to be free from problems (those situation does not exist), but because we just want to deal with better problems. Pondering on how to make my career successful in the future is better than worrying about how to make livings tomorrow. (‘Better’ might not be a perfect word, though. It can be replaced with ‘higher’, ‘ideal’ or else.) The point is that we confront worse problems when we failed to meet expectation with previous ones and vise versa. In other words, we adapt to our lives just like building does. The harmony made by Continuous feedback loop of adaptation is essential to build successful interactions.

Mark Weiser, “The Computer of the 21st Century,” Scientific American, September 1991

Quoting:

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology but of human psychology.

…only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals.

…still focuses attention on a single box

multimedia / virtual reality: simulating the world rather than on invisibly enhancing the world

EMBODIED VIRTUALITY

51701_MDES/MPS Seminar I

A course by Molly Wright Steenson | Carnegie Mellon University | Fall 2018

Jay Huh

Written by

@CMU MDes Candidate | http://jayhuh.com

51701_MDES/MPS Seminar I

A course by Molly Wright Steenson | Carnegie Mellon University | Fall 2018

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