I’m going to try to get down for this. It looks like it’ll be interesting!

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!

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts on my phone through the gReader app. Even in short journeys I can knock off a couple of posts, and it feels like I’m actually participating in things as they happen. (I’m aware that this is an illusion, but it is one that I’m happy to maintain.)

So the phone screen is a good place for short form essays and journalism, and at fist blush it seems that it works for long form too. I’ve been reading Gulliver’s travels through the Kindle app, which has actually been surprisingly easy. The screen makes the columns a good width for reading fast, and the page turns are easier than turning an actual page. This means that I can put the phone on a table, hold my head in one hand, a cup of tea in the other, and read.

The ability to condense a library of books into one small space is pretty cool, as is the ability to look stuff up in a dictionary or on Wikipedia. I’m not wild about having to buy books that I already own so that I can read them this way, it seems that the payment for the IP has already been made, and that the actual cost of providing the content must tend towards zero. However there are so many free classics available that it will probably be a while before I’m hooked enough to fork over any actual money.

I’ll update in a while about what I thought of the experience, but I don’t think that it’ll be too much of a competitor to ‘real’ books in the near future, but in the longer term, probably!

There will be a version of this available soon in a massively reduced format, but for those of you with a penchant for punishment, or perhaps just an unquenchable interest in my ability to drivel on for a hundred pages, here’s my Major study in all it’s pdf glory!

There have been a lot of long nights of faffing about with learning about the technology that runs the internet, But now the building performance quiz is live, working reasonably well in most browsers, and has started producing results!

So “what is it?” I hear you ask!

There are a couple of reasons that I can’t tell you everything about it just yet. But for now it is a quiz that shows up what you know and don’t know about designing for building performance within the emerging low carbon economy.

The key thing is that a lot of people have a go at the quiz, so if you have a screen, and some time, then please do it, and if you have all of the above, and friends, then send it to all of them and beg them to do it too. Please!!!

have a go!

BPquiz.co.uk

This photo has been popping up all over the internet today. It has galvanised me into writing down an idea that I’ve been kicking about for a few weeks. I’ll try and be as structured as I can and rant as little as possible.

Starting with a pair of premises that I believe to be factual.

1. Global fish stocks are severely depleated. I don’t know much about Pacific stocks, but I’d imagine that there is a similar situation to the Atlantic stocks.
2. There are floating islands of plastic in the ocean gyres.

some that are slightly more open to debate, but I still consider to be facts.

• There is likely to be a collapse of the fishing industry if fish stocks reach a terminal point in their populations.
• They are also extremely heavily subsidised, up to 50% of the industries income is from subsidies.
• Fish and other marine animals, particularly filter feeders, are being found with significant ammounts of plastic inside them.
• Plastic in oceans degrades to smaller pieces of plastic as the polymer chains unwind from each other, but very rarely to monomers, or anything that can be digested.

So what can be done about this? Obviously, the simplest answer to the problem of the pastic is to stop putting it into the sea, but this is a global problem, and most of the plastic is not deliberatly put there.

Also we need to stop the part of fishing that involves taking fish out of the water and put some effort into trying to rebuild fish stocks. Probably somethign like 10 or 20 years of not fishing.

"Oh no!" I hear the cries from the fishing industry in disgust and terror for their livelyhoods. "You’ll bancrupt us, and even if you just pay us to stay at home* we’ll loose our craft – the next generation will become 7-11 staff". (*probably not that much more expensive than paying them to go and fish as the current subsidies do.)

My suggestion is that we should redirect the activities of the currently unprofitable fishing industry into fishing for plastic. The deep sea trawlers have the technology and infrastructure to go for long term trips to collect plastic waste. The low hanging fruit in this situation is the large pieces, i.e. plastic bags, detergent bottles, etc. so that’d be a good start. The onboard processing capacity could be put to use in catagorising the plastics, but also once the easy catch of large plastic is taken, the factory ships can set to work on filtering out the much smaller particles of plastic that are in suspention. This would maintain the fleet, and the fleet’s skills. The plastic that was landed could either be recycled or burnt to produce energy.

This would provide a rest for the fish, and also improve their habitat, so that when the stocks have sufficiently recovered, the polymer:meat ratio iside fish is a bit closer to what we’d hope it’d be.

I’ll probably revisit this as I get a bit better at scenario planning and future thinking. weigh in in the comments if you have anything at all to say, and if you are watching in black and white on facebook, go here to watch in green and white.

The 21st century is hailed by many as a ‘make or break’ time for humanity, the tipping point between a technological utopia and a crushing blow to our species’ capacity to flourish. While every effort must be made to steer a path towards a bright future, contingencies for both extremes, as well as the vast, but discontinuous, range of circumstances and possibilities between must be considered.
Only in a very perverse utopia, or particularly devastating catastrophe, does architecture cease to be pertinent (the importance of architects is less certain!).

The risk of global catastrophe, ranging from super volcanoes and runaway global warming to doomsday machines or bio-terrorism, is non trivial. The contingencies in place to contain or manage these events may (if successful) affect societies as much or more than the event itself. Conversely the potential for technology to enhance our lives beyond recognition is considerable. Indeed, it has already been realised. Genetic modification, cognitive enhancement and life extension are just a few of the possibilities.

With these great threats and opportunities come ethical questions about how, and whether, to manage the risks that the implementation of these opportunities (or whether to implement them at all!). While forecasting has its perils, as recent events in the financial sector have shown, it is foolhardy not to prepare to manage the outcomes of potential cataclysms. The continually diverging tree of all possible events makes the odds of a particular event, even in the relatively near future, vanishingly small. We need better tools. I intend learn how to develop a better understanding of the future, and the methods that can be used to improve predictions. Architecture is one of our most persistent projections into the future, there ought to be some consideration of what that future is going be like.

If getting past the next 90 years is really as fraught as is claimed (disasters, divergent societies, etc.) then we have a lot of work to do to get there, but it would make me feel better if I had a bit of an idea of what we’ll find when we do.

If you have any thoughts on things I ought to be looking at then let me know.

The Naïve Set Theory is from the library and is a beautiful pre 1977 version with gold blocked text on the cover, and is for the course I’m about to do (starting tomorrow night – so I’ll probably post up my homework).

The General Systems Theory seems to be out of print, but I’ve got what I think it a first edition from a web bookshop.

They are going to make a bit of a dent in my time compared to the other pop-science that is on that list!