A Wee Bit Radical

(extract from my guest blog for www.engageforeducation.org)

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeldt - there are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns. What we do know is that some of our pupils are in buildings we need to replace, so that’s what we’re doing. We know that pupils, staff, and communities know their own lives better than we do, so that’s why we talk to them first. We know that collaborating for better outcomes leads to . . . better outcomes. And I know that design matters.

What this has led to on the ground is what I call incremental radicalism. Rather than wait for the epiphany which is the ultimate school design, we can simply learn from others – whether it’s from the school down the road or from the innovative global projects showcased in Making Space 2010.

Does this mean I lack ambition? Perhaps what I lack is patience. I do not know the future – and neither do you. But I do see good things happening which should be shared, good ideas which should be celebrated, and good people who should be supported.

We ask our schools to do remarkable things every day. If you know a better way of how design can help make that possible, then please let me know.

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Pointless

When I see a headline which reads 'Free school pioneer says design not necessary' I assume a level of exaggeration. I assume that the author cares about the place he lives in, the vehicle he drives, the hospital that cares for him and his loved ones, and generally the physical nature of the world he spends his days in. Although he goes on to make it very clear that he does not care about the design of the places his children are taught in.

Design is no more necessary than language and mathematics: because it is simply the stuff of our everyday lives. Bad design: he has a point. But all design? A pointless headline.

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Accountability

Scotland is a small country. If you are in a room full of local experts debating a problem that needs solving, then two things are likely. Firstly, the problem likely happened because of previous decisions those same people made, or because of actions they failed to take. Secondly, the solution, and the responsibiity for making it happen, probably lies in the room.

So, lock the doors. Admit that we had a lot to do with causing the problem and that we have a responsibility for fixing it: the opposite to avoiding blame and shuffling responsibilities.

Therefore, never send to know/ For whom the bell tolls/ It tolls for thee - John Donne.

Or, to quote our American cousins - the buck stops here.

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Village Life

A new school in a village can be the most important civic building that will ever be built there. It carries the hopes not just of the designated stakeholders but of the whole community, and can change the nature of a place as somewhere that you would want to live in.

It is easy to overstate ‘placemaking’ at the expense of the delivery of services. But in the real world these two agendas need to be reunited and recognised as facets of the same issue - how to design our built environment to improve our lives.

It takes a whole village to raise a child: and it takes a well designed school to nurture a whole village.

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A Perfect Storm

Context is everything. But to understand the consequences of this, it is first necessary to recognise that what is generic for one expert is unique for another: it all depends on how much you know.

One patch of sea looks pretty much like another, unless you’re on a fishing boat or a North Sea oil platform: see ‘The Perfect Storm’. How we describe where we are, and how much we understand about how this impacts on our lives, will determine how we create places that fit well.

So, by all means be wary of unnecessary complexity. Don’t frame every challenge as if it has never been encountered before. But be afraid of thinking that we can ever reduce our lives, our landscape, and our values into watercolour assumptions of how we’d like the world to be.

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Checkmate

The purpose of chess is checkmate. Everything else – the number of pieces taken, the clarity of the strategy, the finesse of the tactics – is just the stuff you do to get to checkmate.

Of course, for some, the game also evokes beauty and fascination for its own sake. So it’s great if you can do both – but it is critically important to be clear on your personal priorities. A successful chess game is not conducted as a compromise between elegance and winning.

Design projects, on the other hand, are often presented as a balance between time, cost and quality: design as a hostage to value engineering. But getting the balance right doesn’t mean there isn’t an endgame: design, create, checkmate.

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Tunnel Vision

The human eye is constructed in such a way that we have an inevitable ‘blind spot’. We cope with this by scanning our visual field with both eyes and by deducing what we should be seeing. We make an educated guess.

This is fine. The mistake is to assume that because we see something, then everybody else sees it the same way. One person’s educated deduction is another’s wild gamble. Couple this with every culture’s unwillingness to see things which don’t fit into our frame of reference, then we are all literally blind to some things staring us in the face.

So, the last thing we need is to exacerbate this with wilful tunnel vision. It is difficult to see things as they truly are without deciding in advance that we will refuse to look to the left or the right, but cleave only to the marked pathway. Sometimes, like Robert Frost, we need to pay more attention to ‘The Road not Taken’.

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