We are running. And made everything running with us. We are in Schivelbusch’s train. Running so fast the scenes are so blurry to see. Gradually missing out the aura. Making change in time and distance. Pacing up the speed of life more and more. Hallnas and Redstrom asked to slow down to think about the pencil itself to reveal details and system. A traveler I needs to run fast to grab the train, to be there on the right time to see the full moon, to save his front row in the concert, But at the same time he needs to sit down beside that sea to have his evening tea and do nothing. Time is needed to master a craft or a skill. In this speedy life modern education denying the repetitive learning process. As Weiner asked for computing to spare human from repetitive works and machines took over. For architects CAD as the drawing tool took over the place of a drafting table and spared us to redraw the same drawing over and over again. Makes it faster but left some problems with it. We tend to spend less time to draw, thus we skip small detail. We put the hatch rather that drawing each block of brick. Then we jump to other block but the previous one actually has tremendous scope to work with those small brick blocks to wonderful solution. We are missing out the details gradually. In process of this learning we are lacking in understanding. The scale of big projects get lost in the zooming in and zooming out of the window. We end to less understand the environmental fact, rather we put the coordinates to the simulation software to work on the environmental aspect. It is so precise that it actually discourage us to work on that on our own. It is good and bad at the same time. Some projects actually could not be done without the computer aided design. So it is not the CAD it is our knowledge and system that put CAD in distress. The utopia could be if the craftsman is taught CAD to produce crafts. So It is the responsibility of consciousness.

While was reading Fuller, I found it complicated. However after reading Rheingold’s, Fuller started to surface. Mob psychology and awareness act in a completely different way. It takes time but when it takes place the force is enormous. Transportation, communication became so fast that the impact of mob awareness is becoming more and more powerful.I can spot some circumstances in a remote country like Bangladesh. In last few years I have noticed several mass activities conducted by social media and communication. In 2012 one garments building collapsed to concrete sandwich.It was common people ( construction workers mostly) came forward to rescue. Not the Government. This rescue activity was encouraged by chain sms and Facebook events. the communication technology and smart devices combined the mass power.In 2013 all the young people in Dhaka gathered in a certain place in demand of justice for war criminals of Bangladesh in 1971. This movement too occurred through Facebook posts and tweeter. From that moment on a cyber war broke out in Dhaka among the Islamic orthodox and young people.This communication power segmented that same mob that stood together in the previous occurrence. I liked the way Rheingold ended with some questions to be answered.

So this week in principle, I might have to disagree with some of the things that Banham is suggesting.  While I agree with him saying that it is “absurd to demand that objects designed for a short useful life should exhibit signifying eternal validity,” I am not sure if I agree with his overall notion that everything should be continued to be made for a “throw away economy.”  In this economy that we live in, we are always searching for the next best/cheapest form of an instant gratification for our consumerist hunger.  This has resulted in products that are tailored to only last as long as we are interested in them, but decay as soon as are interest is sparked by the next provocative product.  I understand how this has come to be developed, but I can’t help but disagree with this notion entirely.  There is a time and a place for goods that are cheaply made and then discarded.  However, I think that there should be a resurgence in quality products that are meant to stand the test of time.  We have all been frustrated by cheap products not living up to our expectations and then tossing them and grabbing the next cheap replacement.  I believe that a quality functional product is naturally imbued with good design sensibilities because it is forced to be useful in its decision making.  Having quality over quantity would reduce the waste that is created from a constant throw away mentality.  It would also raise the amount of skilled labor jobs that allow for people to actually support themselves comfortably.  While I do not think that there is a single eternal validity in a design, I do believe that design to force some notions of a sustainable lifecycle.

I faced with this question: why the aesthetic taste for us is different from our previous generation? They were interested in more ornament as we see they really took care of the artworks with more decorations but they did not pay attention to the conservation of more simple ones. Here are some elements in production which were remained unchanged; the performance, the users, the quality of the material and the appearance. What has changed in the nature of human that makes this tendency for becoming more interested in pure geometries shape? The replacement of function through the psychological aspect of objects in my opinion plays effective role in this process. In comparison of Bugatti and Buick it should be mentioned that the earlier have not considered the effect life of the car and tried to design in a way that will be beautiful forever; however, the later one try to have some meaningful relation between the beauty and life of the car. Recent trend is mass production because of the society needs however in Bugatti’s view aesthetic quality is more important than quantity of cars.

This transition makes us think about the ways to get rid of undesirable products around us and understanding the effect of this procedure on our lives. I think in addition to the technical issues of remove something from our life, there is an emotional feeling that happens for us. It is not so easy for us to see our grandmother’s building which we have millions of memories there is suddenly demolishing at less than a minute. there are some factors that make the man-thing relationship more and more temporary and ephemeral and growing technology has significant effects on the reducing it. For example, these day people are more interested in renting a furnished home rather than buy everything for it. In the past the goal was to use each product as long as possible but today the current procedure is going to reduce the average life of goods. Why obsolescence happens? Why we want to get rid of something that is still working? I remember that I used my cellphone for than more 7 years. But right now I do not like to use my new I-phone which I bought couple of months ago after seeing the new version which has more capability. Or if I broke my cellphone, it is more easy and cheap for me to buy to new one instead of repairing it. Why? Because in mass production creating everything in large number is much more easy and cheaper while inspecting the problem of each product case by case is very time consuming and needs more human resources and so it will be more expensive.

The chapters of Future Shock by Alvin Toffler brought up good social, political, economical, and technological points in regards to how different levels of societies view their possessions. It was not shocking to find out all the things we throw away everyday, I noticed while I was reading that how many people were throwing out coffee cups that if they had bought a re-usable one they could have just refilled. I never thought of all the things we take for granted like paper products like tissues vs handkerchiefs. Everything in todays society is made to be thrown out and reused, there is a lot of information that suggests that the Iphone batteries are manufactured to only last a year or two so that people have to buy new batteries before the rest of the phone dies. Many of the things we purchase to eat are in disposable containers, my recent dinner that I purchased came in a styrofoam container, my pop came in a plastic bottle. The bottle itself is recyclable and can be reused but wasn’t really designed for it. Technology on the other hand has been improving so fast that throwing out your current piece of technology and getting the latest and greatest makes everything “faster.” Fads on the other hand that come and go are a great way to move a bunch of products that are not meant to be around a long time and then when they are no longer popular then they are thrown away. There are a lot of things that can be easily thrown away and technology has only perpetuated this.

Lucy Suchman‘s in the preface discusses the differences between the ways European and Trukese ways of navigation. The European makes a plan of action and charts it out. The Trukese navigator uses an objective bases navigation system and responds to the conditions that arise. These ways of thinking are relevant to the way that AI designers were are are trying to create AI.

“Children have a tendency, for example, to attribute life to physical objects on the basis of behavior such as autonomous motion…” which describes how

It has been noted on page 602 that human-like automata have been constructed since the Hellenic times, which is roughly around 320bc to roughly 32 AD. These statues were said to “move, gesture, spoke, and generally were imbued by observers” These may have been simple and non electrical running, but they are the basics of automata. Suchman argues that to achieve automata that there must be a disconnect between reasoning and intelligence. Suchman finish up this section with the sentence “state-of-the-art in intelligent machines has yet to attain the basic cognitive abilities of the normal five-year-old child” from the preface it shows that the article was written over 10 years ago and I feel like there may have been a bit of improvement with the increases in computing power.

The idea of Human-computer interaction can only be described at what you put into it is what you get out. I am talking as the basic interaction of a computer meaning programing not an OS setup. Because adding an OS adds languages that the computer that then is described by Dennett as “it is part of our inability to see inside each other’s head, or our mutual opacity” This is also the inability to see what the OS is doing because the end user did not program it (in most cases)

Interaction to interact

In 1958 Debord in his writing tells that coordination is the must to create a situation/performance/intervention. They may have different parts coursed by different authorities but must be coherent with or without being concerned about other authorities working on the same for making one statement.

Now it is 1987. Suchman tells about interaction- action and response. How people act in different “situations”. The action might be purposeful or intuitive depending on situation. Then she draws the attention to the interaction in between man and machine. She asked for a common language to form a dialogue. She assumes artificial intelligence has the ability to give feedback in response.The product of artificial intelligence/artifact should not only be intelligible but also intelligent and self explanatory to communicate with the “partner”.

Then it is 2004. We are in the digital ground with PC, IP, USB, RFID, UPC, EPC, GPS, augmented reality,smart devices and so on. Artificial intelligence has became a natural extension of the work, a natural extension of the person.We are here where Suchman wanted us to see.  In this ground, Malcolm states we established the communication/language, but now it’s time to regulate the communication. As Luis I Kahn emphasized on the distinction in between spaces that serves and spaces that are served. According to Malcolm, now the communication medium is to be served.  To regulate or to fine tune,  he proposes the possibility of interaction/communication method among individuals. He takes the extent from individual to social scale.He assumes this sublime communication will dissolve the barriers of interaction between man an artificial intelligence.

This set of readings was in many ways inspiring.  Rather than go through an analysis of each reading, I think it best to give my overall reaction.   Giedon talks about how artist along with architects and scientist are all looking for new ideas and each conducting experiments to figure out people’s relationship to the their environments.  This really resonated with me.  I thought about how each of us is truly just trying to find different ways of perceiving our world and giving a physical or though provoking manifestation to what we see.  In many ways this is a search for a new way of seeing that has not been done before.  I think now, I understand better the idea of the cubist and new painters of that time.  It was a search to integrate all aspects of the four dimensional world into a single instant.  I can see why the thought was to display motion.  Motion of an objects elicits thoughts of space, relationship, points of view, and and occurrence over time.  The single montage of a person walking can create  so many forms of analyzing space and relationships.  I almost saw their departure from drawing from perspective as their attempt at re-configuring a system.  A system is a set of variables that each have a relationship to one another.  Changing one variable can have an overall affect on that system.  Perspective was just a system for representing the world.  The variables were simply your location in relationship to all of the other objects and their relationship to the vantage points.  It was just done that way for so long that it was accepted as the only means of representation.  Cubist just saw that as a single instance of a visual system.  They simply changed the variables or the relationship of each object to the other and their relationship to the viewers single vantage point.  In a sense, they didn’t necessarily change anything about the world or overall system, but created new way of seeing that system.  I think this is really inspiring.  Each generation has the capacity to change the way things are done or seen.  As architects, we have the gift of understanding systems and relationships.  We should use that to create new methods of seeing and understanding and interacting, not simply create a division of space.

In reading both the Bejamin and McLuhan readings, my response is a bit mixed.  In short the connection I made between the two readings lies within McLuhan’s reoccurring comment, “the medium is the message” and Bejamin’s thoughts on how the concept of the film places the public in the position of the “examiner” but requires them to pay no attention to what is being presented.  McLuhan points out that regardless of what the content of the medium through which something is being conveyed, the medium itself is really what should be analyzed.  He says that “technology…alter(s) sense of ratios and patterns of perception steadily without any resistance.”  I think that overall what he is saying is  that how a message is being conveyed is more important than the message itself.  The medium has the ability to not only cause a reactionary response, but overtime has the ability to change the equilibrium in the masses.  It has the profound effect of altering our perception of issues and how we view and analyze the world.

Likewise, in Bejamin’s reading he goes through the whole line of development on how art was made and how the reproduction of art dilutes its original authenticity or purpose.   Most importantly out of what he says, is when he begins to talk about the medium of film and how that the cameraman has the ability to alter our perception.  Through the cutting of footage and varied camera angles the cameraman has more control over how his work is absorbed versus that of the painter painting a scene.  Through this exercised control of the footage, the cameraman has now created a piece that does not always require a great attention to what is happening on the side of the viewer.   The viewer can almost absent-mindedly absorb the cameraman’s work.

Overall, the ideas I gleaned from the reading is  that the medium and the way the hyper-controlled way it is curated have the ability to change the perception of the viewer.  One forces the viewer to see through a specific lens, while the other changes slowly the way the viewer sees.

Space, Time & Information:

This seminar focuses on relations between architecture, information and computing technologies, and society as they are conditioned by speed: rates of transfer, response, exchange, movement, cognition, and more. Development in the last century has been marked nearly always by new velocities, at times testing or altering human tolerances for construction, for perception, for adaptation, for reliance on shelter and on computational systems. These roles of speed reveal ways that architecture and information systems embody shifts in culture, in technology, and in society – but also shifts in less obvious things like the emergence of global finance and geopolitics. Since late capitalism and the rise of post/industrial economies, these shifts continue as indicators for unprecedented ecological and economic phenomena. Speed, in short, is not neutral or relative but always a function of its circumstance.

In readings and class discussions, we will consider roles of speed in things like modular construction and shifts to rapid prototyping and fabrication; in the dissemination of cybernetic thought; in evolving forms of public space with new telecommunications technologies; and in ecologies of material use. Readings in architecture, in media theory, in philosophy and more will explore ways that time is understood, is constructed in different ways, and to different ends. The seminar culminates with the current movements toward “accelerationism” – rushing modernism and capitalism to some logical conclusions – and an interest in experiences beyond human perception in slowness.

The following themes will organize discussions during the semester:

A – Relativity & Technology

B – Media

C – Consciousness

D – Cybernetics, adaptation and feedback

E – Lifecycles: materials and aging of digital technologies

F – Popular masses, shelter and flash mobs

G – Interactivity

H – Situations

I – Networks

J – Ubiquitous Computing

K – Dromology, Speed, Critical Space

L – Accelerationism and Slowness

Full syllabus can be downloaded here.