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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