This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

With Flora’s ubimash work there is already a substantial technical basis for this work so there is a great possibility to do some really interesting user-focused work.

This all felt like a bit of an epiphany, a keystone that made a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about recently make sense. There must be small things that we can do that make buildings ‘better’. Defining better is an extremely fraught enterprise, but we can make a start along the axes of more profitable?, more enjoyable?, more healthy?, and add more subtlety as we go along. This feels like hacking, not making grand gestures that are based on what we think we know, but tinkering until things work a bit better, gradually finding ways to make spaces that 'work' better than they do now.

This all seems to merge my recent interest in cognative biases, behavioral economics, overconfidence in designers, making measurements of behaviour of people in spaces and Hanson's Homo Hypocritus (to name a few of the things that I've been looking at) with a project that I did with Angela Woda when I was studying at RMIT under Barnaby Bennet and Mark Burry which after much "fuckwittery" (Mark's words) ended up being about improving transport efficiency by changing user behaviour.

The general thesis was that by making the transport system more efficient that the need to build new stations would be alleviated. Relliance on public transport increases with an increasingly urbanised population, and new stations are expensive, and often not very useful¹ for improving the efficiency of the system. we proposed that they best way to improve the efficiency of a train station was to find a way to encourage the passengers to behave in a way that maximised their efficiency, and minimised their obstruction of each other².

The experiment that popped into my head as my path leading from the escalator to the concourse was blocked by the turning girl was very simple; what if there was a barrier at the top of the escalator?

My hypothesis is that there is a time penalty associated with sharp turn angles, and that therefore some sort of barrier would allow for a greater flow of passengers. More specifically, the mixture of turning and non-turning passengers slows everyone down to turning speed.

There are two possible directions from the top of the escalator, so at the moment there are two types of people when it comes to getting off the escalator³. The other main problem is people who stand on the right, apparantly unaware of the social norm that encourages them to stand on the left and walk on the right; signage and loud huffing seems to solve this in London, but I think that people are too laid back/conservative to huff or use signs here in Sydney.

If the streams were to be split gently rather than in the abrupt manner that they are now then they would allow more people to escape the escalator before they clashed at the turn point. This would probably only delay the blockage, but the increased turn radius might make it less damaging.

From drawing these diagrams I’ve come to the opinion that probably the important things in this are going to be

• The amount of separation between the streams before the 'turners' start to slow down. They need to be able to walk past each other before they start to act differently.
• The radius of their turn, sharper turns are likely to result in more of a slow-down.
• Being able to prevent people from standing on the right and thereby impeding the flow of passengers.

I think that actually performing this experiment would be pretty straight forward, the audience passing the top of the escalator can easily be tracked with a thermitrak camera, and then some method of comparing actual flow with theoretical maximum flow could be developed. The conditions could be varied quite simply with some sort of heavy barrier. Lots of variations and lots of data follows!

What a massive rant! What is the point of all that? I know I've probably run into the tl;dr. realm, but I felt that I needed to get at least one tractable example of what I've been thinking about. Lets see if any of this comes to fruition over the next few months/years!

(this is probably going to evlove as we go along!)

The Space Hijackers in London do this sort of thing, but from a more activist perspective. I bet that there is loads of work on this sort of thing already just waiting to be uncovered if I actually started looking!

As always, it was lovely to be back on home turf, and I hope that these scrawlings are useful.

In the last few months I’ve made a few steps in finding the source of this number, and it seems that it might pay to be a bit more careful while using it in future. (Seems – I’d like to know if anyone knows better.)

The most likely source of the number comes from CIBSE guide F. (Thanks Sophie for finding it, I know I’ve been a terrible bore about this subject.)

all adds up to 46% - eureka! It has been found! Lets just cross our Ts and dot our Is to be sure.

This table comes from the ‘Digest of UK energy statistics (London: The Stationery Office)’, and was published in 2000. There are a couple of tricky things here, one glaring, and one that takes a bit of digging. Firstly, 2000 was 11 years ago, and the odds are that the data are even older. 12 years ago I looked like this! These data are published annually and a lot happens in 12 years – is it still a valid number to be quoting? I had a look, and the stationary office doesn’t publish that data any more, it is the the Department of Energy and Climate Change‘s thing.

The places that I’ve been most successful in finding useful information are:

• Eurostat:Using official statistics to calculate greenhouse gas emissions: A statistical guide html version, pdf.
• Department of Energy in the US

If there is an up to date figure then I’d love to see it, it’d make me feel like much less of a fraud when I try to convince people about this kind of thing.

This is a bit of a UTS architecture classic, I think I first heard about it from Adrian Lahoud and Tarsha Finney a few years ago, and Friday’s class was the first chance I’ve had to really try it out.

The format is simple, split the class in half, and sit the two halves facing each other. Then get them to talk about their ideas for 4 minutes. I had everyone sitting pretty close together – it gets pretty noisy but it seems to pump up the endergy a bit. Once the 4 minutes is up you get one side of the group to rotate. Then start again.

It got good feedback from the class. It's almost too easy, it feels a bit like cheating! Because of the short time and high energy the ideas seem to flow so quickly. There is a bit of a problem with how to rearange the group so that the static ones get to talk to each other too, but I'd imagine that once I get around to reading group theory in the bedroom I'll have a way to fix that.

I had an odd number so I popped the odd one off the end and gave them a 4 minute write up session so that they could capture their ideas.

As is usually the way with things that I do, it’s going to be pretty experimental. Here are some of the links to what they are up to:

http://beginnersguidetotheapocalypse.wikispaces.com/ is a simple ‘messy space’ wiki for them to share things.

http://utsapocalypse.net/ is a place for them to blog daily in a slightly more formal way.

and this http://bit.ly/dZIeNC is the brief that I’ve given them at the moment.

I’ll keep updating things as they happen, so keep going back, especially to the blogs, if there are 15 people posting once a day then we ought to have over a thousand blog posts by the end of the semester!

It’s a long way from being a commercial product, but it is certainly useful as an in-house tool. There will be more on the blog about where we are now, and where we could go from here, in the next week, but just as a reminder – here’s the link blog.bvn-usyd.com.

It’s pretty impressive in action, it finds the shortest path (or top n shortest paths) in a cellular building, and can display the measurement along the path. It can do lots of other stuff too, but I’ll leave that up to the boys to describe!

I’ve already got

and

	WHY vs WHY Nuclear Power Barry Brook (YES) vs Ian Lowe (NO)
and
	Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, David JC MacKay

as the main texts for the debate. The first book is specifically Australian, but the second is UK focused (but only really from a data point of view). I’d like to include some contrarian texts too, the two that come to mind are

	The False Promise of Green Energy, by Andrew Morriss, William T. Bogart and Roger E. Meiners
and
	The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley

but I haven’t read either of them, and I’d be interested to hear what other people recommend, and what they think of the books mentioned.

The current motion for the debate is: “this house believes that Australia’s energy supply mix is doing just fine the way it is” and I’m a bit worried that nobody will come to support the motion with any enthusiasm.

I’ll be posting more studio related bits as it gets going, but I’d love some suggestions.