12. Technology - Concept

Week 12

People, Process & Technology

Technology

Concept

By Amal Shah Faculty of Design CEPT University

Teaching Associates Chandni Chhabra, Sachi Motiwala & Shikha Mehta

IR3609 | Monsoon Semester 2020

Nature of Technology - Domaining Design in engineering begins by choosing a domain, that is, by choosing a suitable group of components to construct a device from. Within technology, choice of domain decides not mood nor feeling, but rather the convenience and effectiveness of an assembly, what it can accomplish, how easily it can link with other assemblies, and what it will cost.

Innovations in history may often be improvements in a given technology—a better way to architect domes, a more efficient steam engine.But the significant ones are new domainings. They are the expressing of a given purpose in a different set of components.

2 Courtesy: Arthur,B. (2009). Nature of Technology: What it is and how it evolves. New York : Simon & Schuster.

Nature of Technology - Domaining Such component sets and the way they are used do not just reflect the style of the times, they define the style of the times. An era does not just create technology. Technology creates the era.

Domains do not just define the times, they also define the reach of the times.

3 Courtesy: Arthur,B. (2009). Nature of Technology: What it is and how it evolves. New York : Simon & Schuster.

Nature of Technology - Design as Expression Within a Language The grammars of technology may start as rules, but they end as a way of conceptualizing technologies, a way of thinking. Just as articulate expression within a spoken language depends on more than mere grammar (it depends upon deep knowledge of the words in the language and their cultural associations), so too articulate expression in technology depends on more than grammar alone.

Articulate utterance in technology requires deep knowledge of the domain in question: a fluency in the vocabulary of components used; a familiarity with standard modules, previous designs, standard materials, fastening technologies; a “knowingness” of what is natural and accepted in the culture of that domain.

Intuitive knowledge, cross communication, feeling, past use, imagination, taste—all these count.

4 Courtesy: Arthur,B. (2009). Nature of Technology: What it is and how it evolves. New York : Simon & Schuster.

Nature of Technology - Design as Expression Within a Language Beauty in technology does not quite require originality. In technology both form and phrases are heavily borrowed from other utterances, so in this sense we could say that, ironically, design works by combining and manipulating clichés. Still, a beautiful design always contains some unexpected combination that shocks us with its appropriateness.

A practiced architect, steeped in the art of the domain, will have discarded any notion of the grammar as pure rules, and will use instead an intuitive knowledge of what fits together. And a true master will push the envelope, will write poetry in the domain, will leave his or her “signature” in the habit-combinations used.

Courtesy: Arthur,B. (2009). Nature of Technology: What it is and how it evolves. New York : Simon & Schuster.

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Nature of Technology - Innovation One thing very noticeable about the buildout of new bodies of technology is that their leading edge is highly concentrated in a country or a region. Why should this be so? Why should bodies of technology concentrate in particular locations and not spread themselves evenly over many places?

If technology issued forth from knowledge—technical and scientific information—then any country that possessed capable engineers and scientists would in principle be as innovative as any other.

6 Courtesy: Arthur,B. (2009). Nature of Technology: What it is and how it evolves. New York : Simon & Schuster.

Nature of Technology - Innovation Advanced technology depends on more than knowledge—facts, truths, ideas, and information. Real advanced technology—on-the-edge sophisticated technology—issues not from knowledge but from deep craft.

Deep craft is more than knowledge. It is a set of knowings.

Knowing what methods to use, what principles are likely to succeed, what parameter values to use in a given technique.

It derives collectively from a shared culture of beliefs, an unspoken culture of common experience.

A knowing that again becomes part of a shared culture. Science too at this level is also craft.

7 Courtesy: Arthur,B. (2009). Nature of Technology: What it is and how it evolves. New York : Simon & Schuster.

Future of the Professions - Technology transforming Architecture A great deal of architectural work remains bespoke, albeit in a digital setting—for example, architects manually click, drag, and drop each newly created part of their design into place on a screen. Used in this way, CAD simply streamlines the old approach, with digital designs becoming more detailed, more easily corrected, and more readily shared and reused than the hand-drawn alternative.

The new technologies also give rise to new possibilities: three-dimensional simulations can be walked through and explored, deconstructed and put back together, turned upside-down and zoomed in on, and there can be endless experimentation with different shapes and structures. The available systems offer much greater flexibility for draftsmen than was possible in the past.

8 Courtesy: Daniel, S & Richard, S (2015). The Future of the Professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts

Future of the Professions - Technology transforming Architecture In a similar way, the arrival of ‘computer aided engineering’ (CAE) has transformed the work of structural engineers. Physical prototypes of a possible structure are replaced by computer simulations, and are tested with far greater rigour and precision than in the past. Advances in computational power mean that more complex, and so more computationally challenging, problems can be solved, and so more adventurous construction projects undertaken. The best structural engineers borrow from neighbouring fields like aeronautics, and use their computational techniques to solve their own problems

9 Courtesy: Daniel, S & Richard, S (2015). The Future of the Professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts

Future of the Professions - Technology transforming Architecture There are more complex uses of CAD systems, known collectively as ‘computational design’. These approaches are responsible for the curves and bubbles—the ‘blobitecture’—seen in some contemporary buildings for example, the Beijing National Stadium (‘The Nest’), or City Hall in London (‘The Egg’)

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Future of the Professions - Transformation by Technology Technology lies at the core of most of the changes that we are encountering in the professions.

Traditionally, practical expertise has been held in people’s heads, textbooks, and filing cabinets.

Increasingly, this expertise is being stored and represented, in digital form, in a variety of machines, systems, and tools. As a result, it is being handled, shared, used, and reused in very different ways. No matter how complex the underlying systems, we suggest that the impact of any technology on the professions can be categorized under two broad headings—automation and innovation.

11 Courtesy: Daniel, S & Richard, S (2015). The Future of the Professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts

Future of the Professions - Automation Automation is what most professionals have in mind when they think of the relevance of technology for their disciplines. They think of how they work today, they identify some ineďŹƒcient activities, and then they imagine computerizing them.

Their focus is often on streamlining manual or administrative work. Old ways of operating are not discarded. Instead, a drive for eďŹƒciencies and cost-savings leads to an optimization of traditional professional work. Although adjustment in this spirit could be undertaken by introducing better manual systems, most current streamlining across the professions involves the deployment of technology. This automation therefore complements but does not fundamentally change the central way in which services are delivered.

v/s

12 Courtesy: Daniel, S & Richard, S (2015). The Future of the Professions: how technology will transform the work of human experts

The Digital Turn - Visions Unfolding: Architecture in the Age of Electronic Media The electronic paradigm directs a powerful challenge to architecture because it deďŹ nes reality in terms of media and simulation; it values appearance over existence, what can be seen over what is. Media introduce fundamental ambiguities into how and what we see. Architecture has resisted this question because, since the importation and absorption of perspective by architectural space in the 15th century, architecture has been dominated by the mechanics of vision.

13 Courtesy: Carpo, M (2013). The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012

The Digital Turn - Visions Unfolding: Architecture in the Age of Electronic Media Brunelleschi’s projection system, however, was deeper in its effect than all subsequent stylistic changes because it confirmed vision as the dominant discourse in architecture from the 16th century to the present.

Thus, despite repeated changes in style from the Renaissance through Post-Modernism and despite many attempts to the contrary, the seeing human subject – monocular and anthropocentric – remains the primary discursive term of architecture.

The tradition of planimetric projection in architecture persisted unchallenged because it allowed the projection and hence the understanding of a three-dimensional space in two dimensions. In other disciplines – perhaps since Leibniz and certainly since Sartre – there has been a consistent attempt to demonstrate the problematic qualities inherent in vision but in architecture the sight/mind construct has persisted as the dominant discourse.

Courtesy: Carpo, M (2013). The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012

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The Digital Turn - The Folded Space Suppose for a moment that architecture could be conceptualised as a Moebius strip, with an unbroken continuity between interior and exterior. What would this mean for vision? Gilles Deleuze has proposed just such a possible continuity with his idea of the fold. For Deleuze, folded space articulates a new relationship between vertical and horizontal, figure and ground, inside and out – all structures articulated by traditional vision. Unlike the space of classical vision, the idea of folded space denies framing in favour of a temporal modulation. The fold no longer privileges planimetric projection; instead there is a variable curvature.

Deleuze’s idea of folding is more radical than origami, because it contains no narrative, linear sequence; rather, in terms of traditional vision it contains a quality of the unseen.

15 Courtesy: Carpo, M (2013). The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012

The Digital Turn - The Alteka Tower Project The Alteka Tower project begins simultaneously with an ‘L’ shape drawn both in plan and section. Here, a change in the relationship of perspectival projection to three dimensional space changes the relationship between project drawing and real space. In this sense, these drawings would have little relationship to the space that is being projected. For example, it is no longer possible to draw a line that stands for some scale relationship to another line in the space of the project, thus the drawn lines no longer have anything to do with reason, the connection of the mind to the eye. The drawn lines are folded with some ur-logic according to sections of a fold in René Thom’s catastrophe theory. These folded plans and sections in turn create an object, which is cut into from the ground floor to the top.

16 Courtesy: Carpo, M (2013). The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012

The Digital Turn - The Alteka Tower Project The fold presents the possibility of an alternative to the gridded space of the Cartesian order. The fold produces a dislocation of the dialectical distinction between ďŹ gure and ground; in the process it animates what Gilles Deleuze calls a smooth space.

Smooth space presents the possibility of overcoming or exceeding the grid. The grid remains in place and the four walls will always exist but they are in fact overtaken by the folding of space. Here there is no longer one planimetric view which is then extruded to provide a sectional space. Instead it is no longer possible to relate a vision of space in a two-dimensional drawing to the three-dimensional reality of a folded space.

17 Courtesy: Carpo, M (2013). The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012

The Digital Turn - The Alteka Tower Project This dislocation of the two-dimensional drawing from the three-dimensional reality also begins to dislocate vision, inscribed by this ur-logic. There are no longer grid datum planes for the upright individual. Alteka is not merely a surface architecture or a surface folding.

Rather, the folds create an aective space, a dimension in the space that dislocates the discursive function of the human subject and thus vision, and at the same moment creates a condition of time, of an event in which there is the possibility of the environment looking back at the subject, the possibility of the gaze

18 Courtesy: Carpo, M (2013). The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012

The Digital Turn “Architecture will continue to stand up, to deal with gravity, to have ‘four walls’. But these four walls no longer need to be expressive of the mechanical paradigm. Rather they could deal with the possibility of these other discourses, the other affective senses of sound, touch and of that light lying within the darkness.”

19 Courtesy: Carpo, M (2013). The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012

What does the conuence of People, Process, and Technology lead to?

People

Process

Technology

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Confluence of People, Process, and Technology - Systems Thinking Systems thinking is an approach to integration that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system will act differently when isolated from the system's environment or other parts of the system. Systems thinking is a powerful approach for understanding the nature of why situations are the way they are, and how to go about improving results.

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People, processes, and technology are interdependent parts of a whole.

A change in one of the parts will result in an effect on the others.

The actions can be properly integrated and have applied for a common goal.

The sum of the efforts of each part generates a synergy in that the last transmission has more value than if we add each transmission individually.

People

Process

Technology

21 Courtesy: https://www.heflo.com/blog/bpm/technology-people-and-processes/

Conuence of People, Process, and Technology Socio-Technical Systems Thinking Sociotechnical systems refers to the interaction between society's complex infrastructures and human behaviour, and recognizes the interaction between people, process, and technology. It applies an understanding of the social structures, (the social sciences) to inform the design of systems that involve communities of people and technology.

Socio-technical systems are interfaces between technical systems and the many layers of human architectures – from cognitive systems underpinning perception and understanding, to the socio-cultural systems of local communities, to the wider architecture of the socio-political, socio-economic and sociocultural systems in which they operate. These focus primarily on the need to align People, Process, and Technology in the system.

For example, some approaches to system design now do draw on ethnographic methodologies from the social sciences.

22 Socio-technical system thinking for a corporate model

Aligning Society and Technology Aligning Society and Technology provides: ●

sustainable production of shareable, reusable community-specific resources;

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a sustainable model for generating, updating and promoting new resources to very distributed and heterogeneous users;

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new opportunities for collaborative networking, resource sharing and collaboration.

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Aligning Society and Technology The apparent complexity of socio-technical systems masks a recurring set of archetypes, or generic scenarios, knowledge of which provide the potential to add value and cut cost/risk.

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Aligning People Process and Technology A range of strategies that align people, processes and technologies to advantage at the interfaces between the technical and the human architecture. These strategies include: ●

Using a common platform – designing technology around the architecture of the cognitive or social processes;

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Bridging the gap – human, technical or socio-technical middleware at the interfaces where costs or value can be generated;

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Creating new linkages between technical and/or human networks;

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aligning systems to create value.

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Human Information Processing Systems It serves to highlight: Input

Perception

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The role of concepts in structuring knowledge of relations between situated understanding;

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The underestimated role of constructs in structuring knowledge of relations between actions and outcomes, leading to situated action;

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The role of feedback from the environment in reshaping or reinforcing these in dynamic and adaptive ways;

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Where and how technical, social, cultural or physical systems can interface with this process – either 26 positively or negatively.

Conception Construction Modelling

VALUE

Data

Information

Knowledge

Decision Making