Useful and Helpful

Among my frequently asked questions is – how do you measure your work? That’s a fair question. I spent a fair chunk of the 1980s doing investment appraisal analysis, which only proved to me the prevalence of a well known decision making technique called backfilling the data. So, how do I answer this?

First of all I tell them what I don’t do. I don’t focus on those things that can be easily measured rather than those things that need to be done. I don’t manipulate unique projects to make them look like they contribute to a set of generic metrics. In essence, I say that measurement of outputs is secondary to their impact on outcomes. So how do I keep on track?

The first way is to challenge my own motives for doing the work. The second is to ask those I’m working with if it’s useful and helpful. And the third is to ask those I work for whether it makes a difference. As Groucho Marx once said - Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

Have a great Christmas and may we all make a difference in 2010.

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Acquired Taste

At this time of year the magazines are full of lists: the top ten best films, books of the year, best board games etc. It is a lesson in fallibility to realise how many great products and ideas of their age are now forgotten, and how some that were ignored or criticised at the time have survived and become admired. Think of writers touched by genius like John Keats, or now iconic films like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’.

Some designs are an acquired taste. Some create a great first impression that wanes with acquaintance. Some do neither, or both. Some become detached from their original purpose or meaning – like the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe.

The point is that buildings cannot be judged like an X Factor competitor. To really judge a building you need to live with it for a while, and place it in the context of your own life. There are no infallible criteria for design – just lives lived for the better.

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Casting

When the endless screen credits role, they invariably include the names of the Casting Directors. Choosing the right people for the right roles is obviously a critical starting point for any creative endeavour. Of course every good actor can act, but some are quite simply better suited to some types of roles than others.

Perhaps, according to movie casting mythology, Ronald Reagan would indeed have made a convincing Rick – the Humphrey Bogart role in the film Casablanca - but it wouldn’t be the classic we know and love. Casting makes a critical difference.

Not surprisingly, this also applies to designers. Choosing the right designers for a project is a prerequisite for a successful outcome. Even if we listen to those who say that all professionally qualified architects are by definition good designers – they are not all good in the same way.

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City of the Year

The Academy of Urbanism presented its awards last Friday. The 2010 categories were for European City of the Year, as well as for Great Towns, Neighbourhoods, Streets, and Places. And it was infectious to be in a room full of diverse people with a shared enthusiasm for places that quite simply make life better in so many different ways. Whether driven by an architectural legacy, or a passion for ideas – the common message that came across was the importance of key individuals with a relentless commitment to a particular place and its people

The winner of the European City of the Year Award for 2010 was Freiburg 'a model for sustainability across the globe'. In the Academy’s appreciation there are two short sentences which are inspiring in their directness and simplicity:

Freiburg functions well.

Freiburg has much to teach us.

Those would seem to be worthwhile aspirations for all of us when creating everyday places that deserve our everyday plaudits.

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Knots

One argument goes that if we don’t define what we want then we might get something we don’t want. On the other hand if we specify too tightly then we miss out on exploring better, unforeseen answers. There is a verse of modern poetry by RD Laing, from his book 'Knots', which captures this situation:

If I don’t know I don’t know

I think I know




If I don’t know I know

I think I don’t know

We may need to read his words twice – but we all recognise the bewildering truth he describes. There is a crucial question at the heart of every brief: are we trying to define an answer or define a question? If you believe, as I do, that design is much more than a means of delivering utility, then the answer lies in getting the questions right.

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Choose Design

Design is often something we turn to after we’ve solved the big problems - as if it is comfort food. It is difficult to exaggerate just how far that view misses the point. And it is difficult to underestimate the opportunities we miss, and the resources we potentially squander, by not exploiting what design can offer us.

First of all, design is a unique tool for solving big problems. It is what we should bring to the table at the start. Why? Because design helps us reframe questions as well as reimagine answers. Design is not just a drawing: it is an approach, a tool, a way of looking at the world and making it different. To borrow an epithet of scorn from sustainability, it is not ‘designer bling’.

We can choose how to define design. Certainly, it can be seen as representation or decoration - or it can be seen as ‘the purpose or planning that exists behind an action or object’. I choose the latter.

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The Wind in our Sails

One argument put forward against user engagement and regular consultation is – we don’t want to risk a change in direction. It seems the preferred option is to travel hopefully and then deal with any major course corrections at crunch meetings marked on the project manager’s gant chart as points of no return. This is hard to do when the only two choices are – meet the right brief or deliver the wrong project.

The alternative is to make continous small corrections depending on the surrounding conditions – to get to where you want to go in the best way you can. In the yachting world this is called ‘Sail Trimming’ - the art of adjusting your sails to make the best use of the wind in moving your boat forward.

So, when the wind begins to change, we need to react - quickly. If we want to arrive safely in the right harbour then we need to be realistic about how we work with the changing elements rather than against them.

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Upgrade Now

'It is strongly recommended that you upgrade Firefox as soon as possible' is the message that invariably interrupts me sending an important e-mail. I press the 'not now' button and finish what I'm doing. Later I worry: perhaps strongly recommended is code for 'or else suffer catastrophic consequences'.

I am sure that it is inconceivable to the software designers that I do not immediately follow their instructions. Just as it is inconceivable to some architects that the users of their buildings don't take full advantage of their design potential - they refuse to upgrade. But sometimes we are all preoccupied with life's other priorities, or just distrustful.

Upgrades are not a no-brainer. We first of all need to be convinced that we need an upgrade. And we will - when we have the focus, the trust, and the desire. Meanwhile, I strongly recommend that you upgrade Design as soon as possible.

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Design Haiku

A haiku is a Japanese poetic form of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five. It aspires to translate, within a very intense structure, lived moments into life changing insights. Constraints are not always a bad thing.

There is a saying in management consultancy - every challenge is an opportunity, but some opportunities are insurmountable. The world is full of great buildings which were shaped by the need to surmount insurmountable difficulties. Design provides us with a tool not just for overcoming constraints, but for befriending them – using them as catalysts for innovation and creativity.

World class buildings, like world class poems, happen when constraints and imagination effortlessly come together - design haiku for the future.

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A Room with a Kettle

Every building has a threshold – a point at which something starts or ceases to happen. Crossing that threshold is not always easy. Some buildings just seem too difficult to enter: they carry meanings and associations best avoided.

It is an obvious point that to deliver wider educational services we need people to willingly cross the threshold – ideally with hope rather than apprehension in their hearts. Well designed buildings make you want to enter them. They create a place you want to be

At a recent seminar by the Open University I heard someone describe their preferred place to encourage and nurture wider participation in learning as a room with a kettle. That sounds like a safe place. It sounds like a place you would enter.

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Survival of the Fittest

Our new website is live at www.smarterplaces.org. Our objective is simple: to provide those who want to participate in school design with the means to explore, evolve, and communicate their ideas.

There is something profound about releasing ideas onto the internet where Darwinian rules apply. The first measure is survival, and our hope is that the website will find its own important niche in the food chain and grow to become an integral part of the language of school design in Scotland.

To do this, we need to let go of our creation – to allow it to change in response to what the world wants from it. Eventually, we all need to recognise this as an essential part of the design process – allowing our designs to make their own way in the world.

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Enough is Enough

How much is enough? Game Theory would encourage us to think carefully before we assume that each of us pursuing the absolutely best possible solutions will result in the best possible outcomes.

Yet we have been trained by experience to articulate our requirements as if they were negotiating stances rather than expressions of heartfelt need. As a consequence, every solution, no matter its quality, is seen as a compromise with our theoretical ideal world. We expect our Utopian hopes to be dashed and they inevitably are.

Economists talk of a point reached in consumption when further consumption fails to add any value. The technical term for this is Bliss Point – defined as the total satiation of wants. In design, more is not always better. Sometimes, enough is enough.

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Lessons Learnt

St Margaret’s Academy, West Lothian, is over 15 years old, yet avoided many of the mistakes of its predecessors – and stands up well to the passage of time and ideas. One can only imagine the moment when its architect questioned the way things were always done and decided to think again.

There may indeed be only one lesson to learn – that we need to think carefully about why we repeat ourselves. The good reason is to build on experience and not reinvent the wheel: the bad reason is because we didn’t think.

‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got’. We know this. We know that we are all guilty of repeating the same mistakes. The lesson for designers is . . . think again.

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Sensible Answers Only

The class were looking enthused, and were even more engaged when they were told by the guest there were no right answers to the questions they were being asked. So, pens poised, creativity sparked . . . and then the teacher said “sensible answers only”.

There is an old adage amongst courtroom lawyers that you should never ask a witness a question to which you do not already know the answer. Otherwise, you risk being wrongfooted by unexpected responses that may not support your case.

But the whole point of creating a useful brief is to ask open questions in a way which is open to new answers. So, fewer ‘sensible’ answers please, and more ‘sensibility’ (defn: the ability to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences).

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ICT

There is something about the term ‘ICT’ that surgically removes any sense of excitement about the possibilities of techology to transform our lives. In a recent discussion with a younger colleague about the learning potential of websites such as Facebook I realised that for her the use of such social networking tools are simply the way life is lived today.

Information, Communication, Technology: a very inelegant way of saying ‘the way life is lived today’. ICT is no longer a potential, or an opportunity, it is a fact. The challenge is to come to terms with this fact in our design of school buildings.

My generation make jokes about asking teenagers to come to our rescue when technology refuses to speak our language. However, when we design for technology we continue to give greater weight to our own painfully acquired understanding. For me, acknowledging the generation gap is about accepting what I don’t know, and asking those who do – whatever their age.

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Homework

Working with The Children's Parliament in The Royal High School building on Calton Hill was a great experience in a great building. Just being there was a powerful reminder of two obvious design lessons.

Firstly, the significance of space. Being in an environment with architectural presence reminds everyone of all ages that the way your surroundings look and feel affects the way you behave, and the perceived value of what you are doing.

Secondly, the history of a place is important. What a place stands for, and what it means to its community, goes way beyond the architectural merits of its columns and cornices. People define buildings.

We asked the children to think over the next few weeks about how they feel in different spaces, and to ask questions of themselves about why they respond the way they do. It’s homework we should all be doing if we are to create new buildings with resonance and significance.

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Vanilla Essence

For a long time there was a misconception amongst some developers that magnolia was not a colour. As in ‘we didn’t want to use a colour so we painted the rooms magnolia’.

In all types of design we are occasionally blind to key features which are the perverse result of not making a decision – like the automatic default settings on our technology. Not all unthinking decisions are bad – but it’s a dangerous way to spend a lot of money.

A common fear about more analytical approaches to design is that we will inevitably end up with ‘vanilla’ design: design without heart or expression, like wind tunnel designed cars, or magnolia painted rooms. Underlying these fears is the suspicion that if we think too much about design we will be less creative. There is one compelling rebuttal of this – it is not true. Quality design comes from quality of forethought. Good design is not an accident or a default - and it is never inevitable.

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The Wrong Questions

Does it work? I get asked, as I’m shown a school plan for the first time.  Do you think it’s fit for purpose?  asks my guide around a new school.  What’s wrong with our schools? asks yet another single minded journalist.

 

My response is to answer a different set of questions.  What can we learn from this plan? Do we have a clear purpose?  What‘s great about our schools?  By persisting in our search for mistakes we make it harder to explore the new: we make it harder to change.  Change is not a constant - it is a risk we take to make the world better.

 

Perhaps we ask the ‘wrong questions’ so often because we have already made up our minds about the answers.  If we know all the answers then design has little purpose. Questions are central to challenging and transforming our environment.  Good design is both a difficult choice made and a thoughful answer to a genuine question.

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Courage

An eye surgeon, or to give him his full title ‘Consultant Opthalmic Surgeon’, talked to me recently about how impressed he was by the courage of parents who handed over their babies into his care for dangerous operations. An unimaginable situation for most of us.

 

It highlighted for me the emotional commitment underlying phrases such as “exercising due care" or “in loco parentis”.  Every day parents bring to the school gates that which they value most and deliver them into our trust. It takes courage to do this, on both sides of the fence.

 

Victoria Wood was once asked about the ‘dangers’ in doing stand up comedy.  She replied that the worst that could happen was 20 minutes of feeling a wee bit uncomfortable.  Next time we are frightened of the consequences of putting our eyes above the parapet in the pursuit of good design we should put the courage required in perspective. 

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Foolish Certainties

I am amazed by those who are certain about the future  . . about other people’s motivations, about the way the world works . . . and therefore know what’s best for everyone, everywhere, forever.  Experience has taught me to be wary of such certainty, for the simple reason that we can all be wrong and we can all make poor decisions.  Judgement is defined as the ability to make considered decisions or form sensible opinions and is always open to human error.

 

So in an uncertain world how do we go about making considered decisions and forming sensible opinions.  The starting point is having the humility to accept that we may be wrong, and to ensure that when we are wrong the consequences are acceptable.

 

Some people call this risk management, or scenario testing, or investment appraisal.  All of these are fundamentally about ensuring that the decisions we take are the right decisions, even when they are wrong. Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in America, only invests in companies that can be run by fools – because one day they will be.   We owe it to ourselves to design buildings that outlive, outlast, and outperform foolish certainties.

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The Whole Story

Raymond Carver was one of the world’s great short story writers.  He inhabited small moments in a way which captured the whole story of a relationship or a situation.  The small pieces were not only a part of life – they represented the whole of life.  The same could be said of a painter like Vermeer who said everything he wanted to say about the society of his time in a timeless image of a domestic moment.

 

Schools are not only part of a bigger picture – they are themselves a representation of the whole picture.  The way we design our schools speaks volumes about how we view children and how they connect with the rest of our community.  So, we need to know what we are trying to say.

 

Indeed, a good question to ask of any design is – does it convey the message I want to convey.  This is not spin, it is the reality of buildings.  Design speaks whether we want it to or not.  Our challenge is to make it say what we want it to say.  

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Beyond the Page

To paraphrase John Donne, ‘no site is an island, entire of itself’. 

I once worked with urban and landscape designers who approached every site as if its sphere of influence was set 1 kilometre beyond the site boundary.  At the simplest level this meant that their drawings always included the wider context.  

As designers we need to be reminded to go beyond the page when we draw schools: if the school is at the heart of the community, then where is the community?  The work of the Scottish Renaissance Towns Initiative shows the power of breaking free from the site plan to engage with the wider community and explore and create more meaningful places to live.

 

Part of this exploration is a better understanding of the physical grain of our towns.  Our places are complex if you acknowledge their connections, and messy to describe in professional prose.  But these are the places in which we spend our complex, messy lives.

 

‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’ seems more than enough justification to ask difficult questions about what our school designs mean to the communities beyond the page. 

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Frequently asked questions

Participation seems like a good idea to most people – but general support is almost always tempered by specific reservations.  These reservations usually find expression in three frequently asked questions.

 

Isn’t there a danger of raising unrealistic expectations?  Yes there is, if you ask people what solutions they want built rather than what needs they want satisified.  Participation is an engagement process which firstly informs the brief – it is not a substitute for design.

 

Why should experienced professionals listen to inexperienced amateurs?  Because it’s their building.  Because they will have to live their lives in what the profesionals create.  Because they are the world class experts about their own lives.  And, because the alternative – don’t try to understand or engage with the people who will use your design – is a surreal standpoint.

 

Don’t people only really know what they want after its provided? Henry Ford is often quoted here as saying that if he had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses not automobiles.  No, Henry, you miss the point.  They would have said that they wanted to travel faster and more easily.

 

These days participation is not an option, and in my experience it can be a revelation.  Better briefs, better insights, better outcomes.  Any questions?

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Empathy

Preparing a lecture for Edinburgh University’s Update in Architectural Management Course forced me to reflect on what we mean by the word ‘client’.  And also, what that word means to an Architect - I use a capital letter because the audience were all students about to sit their final professional examinations after at least seven years of study and experience.

 

And for me their critical lesson needs to be the importance of empathy.  We need to see clients as representing people like us, not as representatives of the other.  

By assuming that they share our own drives and foibles, we can begin to identify with each other, and perhaps cease to be divided by a common professional language and simply be united by a common humanity.

 

Descriptions of the briefing and design process tend to use a shorthand of what makes all of the participants different – the unique skill each brings to the project.   I have heard an economist actually say – “as an economist I think this, however, as a human being  . . “

 

What we mean by ‘client’ is someone who is first and foremost another human being.

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Les Miserables

Airdrie Academy’s school production this year  was Les Miserables.

So, I guess that’s the benchmark then for ambition and aspiration. This is the equivalent of asking design students to have a go at architectural productions based on Gaudi’s Cathedral in Barcelona, The Sagrada Familia.

It takes courage to make that decision.  “Right, this year we’re going to do Les Miserables.” 

It also takes belief in what can be achieved and trust in those around you. And of course it helps a lot that the new facilities are there to accommodate your ambitions.  Because that is the true nature of an accommodation schedule – a description of facilities to accommodate ambition.

 

Next time we say ‘fit for purpose’ remember Airdrie Academy and Les Miserables. 

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Concrete Poetry

25 years ago I worked for the Department of Education and Science (DES), and with the Scottish Education Department (SED) and the Programme on Educational Building (PEB) at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Most of these acronyms have been updated and relaunched with different initials.

It is easy to reel them off with a sense of irony, but there is real force in these abbreviations when they are allied to significant values. Shorthand is powerful when it is used to convey complex messages – a kind of concrete poetry of policy.

But there can also be an unearned familiarity which convinces us that we know what something means when all we really know is how to abbreviate it.

CfE is not the same as Curriculum for Excellence. SFT is not the same as the Scottish Futures Trust. By saying the words we remind ourselves what they are about.

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A Sense of Awe

I stood on a school site in Orkney and thought – place matters. In truth the actual words I thought were much more forthright. When landscape, history, culture, skyscape, the sea, architecture . . all come together, you know in your bones that the design of the place on which you stand can be profoundly important.

Likewise, I visited Madras College in Fife – a significant place in the history of educational thought. The older part of the school dates from the early 19th Century and, once again, you know when you enter it that this place matters – the values of its story are written in the stones of its well proportioned facades.

Design seems difficult because it is. When we are inspired by a place we need to acknowledge it with more than polite professional words – and sometimes with a sense of awe at the responsibility we have in reshaping the world we live in.

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Looking Good

‘Design makes something look good but it’s engineering that makes it work’ says Richard Carter from London in his letter to The Guardian (Friday 8 May 2009). This would be news to engineers from Thomas Telford to Santiago Calatrava and to architects from Robert Adam to Frank Gehry.

This cuts to the core of why, to most people, the very mention of Design can seem like an extravagance. The only way to change this misconception is to meet the challenge head on; by designing our collective hearts out, in a way which makes a real impact on people’s lives by giving them beautiful places that work well.

Design is a way of looking at life with the belief that things can be made better by the way in which you shape the physical environment. I’m an architect, and I’m not embarrassed if a building looks good, and neither are engineers.

It’s not a choice, Richard Carter from London, that’s what real Design is all about.

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A Good Start

The Lighthouse project Senses of Place showed what can be sparked by really talking to pupils and letting them inspire talented designers who know how to really listen.  

Working with those same designers, A+DS has explored what some of those initial ideas might mean when held up to the shadowed light of architectural pragmatism.  The results are inspiring.  They range from toolkits to help learners reclaim their Cities, to creating learning spaces which aren’t afraid to take the exhortations of Curriculum for Excellence at their face value. They show how we may not always know the destination of design but we do know where it starts – with the people whose lives are spent  within our creations.

The poet Kenneth White talks of the need to ‘give yourself room for a real beginning’.  Where we start determines where we finish – so start well.

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