It’s 10AM and according to my helpful smartphone app I’ve already
walked 4367 steps. The app also tells me that 4367 steps equals 2.08 miles. This
app comes, unrequested and free, with the new operating system of my iPhone and
lets me obsess over all sorts of personal health issues that my steam-punk Razr couldn’t imagine…if a phone can imagine at all. I’ve written before here
about the gap between metrics and
perception of things like distance, so I’m happy that my phone is smart enough to
convert my steps into miles. Who really measures distance in steps? Would you ever give directions in steps? "Just go about 1500 steps, turn right and after 3412 steps you'll be there."
I had a hunch,
based on graphic distances on actual maps, that I typically walked about 2+
miles per day just getting to and from school.
My phone gives me more nuanced and provocative data…and some real
surprises. On Monday I walked over 12,000 steps; yesterday only in the
upper 9000s. Both were WAAC days,
meaning that I had the same commute. Why the difference? Well, Monday is a studio day and Tuesday is a
seminar day, and that means that on Monday I walked up and down stairs, in and
out of rooms, and even back and forth between 601 and 1001 Prince a few times.
Tuesday I was mostly stationary lecturing, although I made a few 601/1001 trips. This got me thinking, of course, about
technology, efficiency, pedagogy, public health and urban design.
At the WAAC we organize studio completely differently from other schools: studio is an identity rather than a geographic location. My
students—and they’re not really mine at all as we always team teach—do not all
sit in one room side by side; they occupy desks on every floor of both of our
buildings. To give a desk crit to any
one of them I have to walk to find them.
There are many practical and pedagogical reasons for that: it disrupts
the hegemony of program, dissolves the autocracy of the studio critic, and it guarantees
mixing with other design disciplines and levels. There are downsides which are in fact simply
the dark side of each of the above reasons, but I hadn’t really thought that one of
the benefits was fitness. Turns out we’ve
inadvertently provided an active design workplace. One could argue, and more than one has
argued, it certainly isn’t the most efficient way to organize students. That’s
only true, however, from an industrial era definition of efficiency. We don’t subscribe to Taylorist principles
within design studio, so why would we want it to be organized like a Frankfurt
kitchen, where the studio critic can move from student to student with maximum efficiency
and minimum exertion?
Technology and efficiency are tightly intertwined. As Carl Mitcham says, all technological
innovations arise from efforts to save effort. Interpreted narrowly and applied
uncritically to more complex systems—such as educational institutions and cities—the pursuit
of technological efficiency can have strangely inefficient consequences. It may seem like I have a comically inefficient
workday, adding 2-3 extra miles of walking just to do my job, it is just a
different kind of efficiency. If I drove
to work, which would be faster—such a 20th century definition of efficiency—and
could see all my students in one room Frankfurt kitchen-style, then I’d have to
set aside some chunk of time to get 5 miles of walking or running into my day. How inefficient is that?
In the Intelligent Cities project we explored the complex and sometimes invisible way that new
information and communication technologies, like smartphones, are changing our
cities. Even as I carry around with me
the most sophisticated efforts to save effort—hey, Siri—it does seem that we
are in the process of redefining efficiency in the same way that chaos theory
redefined order. Inefficiencies can be
remarkably efficient if seen from the correct perspective.
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