Infraculture (Page 2)

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What can a Building Technologist do about Climate Change?

What can a Building Technologist do about Climate Change?

Title inspired by Bret Victor’s piece “What can a Technologist do about Climate Change? [http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/]“ Something that has been swirling in my mind lately: personally having a more direct impact on our quest to reduce the causes of climate change. While I’ve been indirectly involved

Fragmentation in the building industry

Fragmentation in the building industry

An excellent framing of the fragmentation in the building industry can be found in Dana A Sheffer’s 2010 dissertation on the Diffusion of Energy Saving Technologies in the Building Industry [https://gpc.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj8226/f/wp057_0.pdf]. (Also see related work here [https://www.

The kind of problem a building is

Complex Systems

The kind of problem a building is

Concluding her famous book, Jane Jacobs writes: “Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity.” From sidewalks of access to sidewalks of place, cities deal “simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole [1].” My question today: If a city is a problem of

New ways of distributed work: By the senses

New ways of distributed work: By the senses

Attention “We rarely attend to what we know.” That’s what urban geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes in his book Space and Place. It’s a refrain that stays with me. Everywhere I go these days, I see and hear comments and questions on the time and space of flows and

Org Design, Part 1: Nearly decomposable systems, with Serendipity & Slack

Org Design, Part 1: Nearly decomposable systems, with Serendipity & Slack

PART 1. > “Organizations are systems of behavior designed to enable humans to accomplish their goals” –Herb Simon, The Shape of Automation [https://twitter.com/voeliz/status/1105159342666342400] The “buzziness” of 50-100 The period of organizational growth from 50 to 100 people can be a chaotic time. According to physicist

My 2018 reading list

Ways of Thinking

My 2018 reading list

Books (with sprinkling of articles & podcasts) that have stuck with me throughout 2018 * Scale [https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582] by G West * Engineering Systems [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engineering-systems] by O de Weck, D Roos, C Magee * Thinking in Systems [https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/

Should I be writing more?

Should I be writing more?

Something I’ve been struggling with lately is: how does one best “package” their efforts to demonstrate what they’re thinking, working on, achieving? I don’t mean in the sense of a resume or elevator pitch. I mean, how do we point to the ongoing outcomes of our efforts,

How Buildings Learn: Beijing Hutongs (thoughts on the unpublished chapter)

How Buildings Learn: Beijing Hutongs (thoughts on the unpublished chapter)

The hutongs north of Beijing’s Forbidden City have always been my favorite part of the city. Narrow alleyways, curving about, full of chaotic day to day life. Or so, that was my experience hearing my mother’s stories from the early 1980s (as a Hong Konger living in Beijing

Systems Thinking

Tixi 体系

Over dinner with my former colleague ZZ in Changsha, he mentioned something that caught my attention. “You know in China, we have this saying: Tixi jueding suoyou de dongxi. The tixi decides all things.” I had to look up “tixi” (体系) in my Pleco Chinese dictionary first. “System; Setup” Pleco

TRIP NOTES: CHINA [Dec 2018]

TRIP NOTES: CHINA [Dec 2018]

Rough notes from a week-long revisit to China: Beijing, Wuhan, Changsha, Kunming. Mix of travel tips and reflection, with summarizing thoughts at end. Written with the understanding that these stories are indicative, not representative. For context: I lived in Wuhan 2009-2010 and Beijing 2010-2014. The highspeed rail makes this journey

My mental ecosystem: this year’s lessons from Herb Simon

My mental ecosystem: this year’s lessons from Herb Simon

This year, I’ve been fascinated by Herb Simon. We’re on nickname terms, he and I. There is much that Herb Simon should be known for, including: * Founding the Business AND Computer Science programs at Carnegie Mellon… and revamping the Psychology program, too * Elucidating the concepts of satisficing [https:

Making infrastructure sexy

Making infrastructure sexy

The Temple of Heaven, a favorite site for a kid living in 1990s Beijing, captured my imagination with its careful construction. Working in 2007 as an engineering intern with Washington State’s Dept of Transportation— cataloging old boring piles for Seattle’s waterfront viaduct [http://data.wsdot.wa.gov/publications/

Simon DeDeo’s hand drawn notes for entropy class

From the Notes Vault Source: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~simon/lecture1_dedeo_csss_2010.pdf Entropy is a measure of a system’s: * Disorder * Information * Information carrying capacity * Uncertainty * Diversity Entropy is also PHYSICAL. You can look up entropies of different substances. “Water is just ice where the molecules are

On being a little underemployed

On being a little underemployed

From the Notes Vault In the excerpts below, both Patrick and Morgan discuss the benefits of “working less”… with the following fundamentals: (1) The need to signal that you’re a hard worker in terms of amassed hours is stupid (2) It’s important to celebrate and build in times

Dialogues on Infrastructure

Dialogues on Infrastructure

The following is an elaborated transcription from an in-person dialogue on Infrastructure. For a more navigable version of this content, see this Notion page [https://www.notion.so/Infrastructure-Talks-2564a146a3b148cf8c7e1773e257e5bd]. > This session is going to be an open conversation. I’ll first seed it with my own thoughts from my

The Liability of Architects and Engineers in 19th Century America

How do the incentives (and counterbalance, risks and liabilities) of certain stakeholders within the project delivery process for buildings end up shaping the buildings themselves? Pointer from: Rabbit hole learning about project delivery that produced the Empire State Building Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1424833?seq=1#page_scan_

Empire State building as lean project delivery

I suspect the design-bid-build nature of our “traditional” buildings industry has an impact on *progress.* Albeit what we call traditional is actually recent to the past ~100 years compared to the design-build process of history. This paper explains that the Empire State Building’s speed of construction was attributed to

Notes from: How To Be a Systems Thinker | Edge.org

MC Bateson on getting reacquainted with Cybernetics Pointer from: Searching “Macy conferences” obviously Systems Thinker caught my eye 🙂 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How To Be a Systems Thinker A Conversation With Mary Catherine Bateson [http://if%20you%20use%20the%20word%20%22cyber%22%20in%20our%20society%20now%2C%20people%20think%20that%20it%20means%

Notes from: Mirror Worlds

How to build topsight? * Space organization structures (map) * Time-organizing structures (script) Pointer from: Steven Johnson on a a16z podcast -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BOOK EXCERPTS: Topsight * “Topsight is what comes from a far overhead vantage point, from a birds eye view that reveals the whole— the big picture; how the parts fit together.

Subterranean games

Subterranean games

Increased computing for video games means now can build parts of worlds never built before. This is both related to open world games, but also to the layers of structural complexity within the games themselves. For example, video game makers never built their games to include the subterranean world before—

Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth 10k Words– Larkin & Simon

Caught my attention for love of diagramming. Stayed for the relationship between spatial & relational mapping, plus effective 80-20-esque impacts to search Pointer from: WikiQuotes link from Herb Simon Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1551-6708.1987.tb00863.x -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- EXCERPTS * Sentential representations are sequential, like

Why my interest in Control & Feedback?

Why my interest in Control & Feedback?

What concepts from the early days of automation / systems thinking were tossed out because they were not economically / socially / technically feasible… at the time? What might be applicable today?

How to build a Systems Lab?

Systems Thinking

How to build a Systems Lab?

These ideas are a Work in Progress, i.e. in full-on morphing form. If a systems perspective is not part of your DNA (quite likely), how do you instill rigor around systems thinking at your organization? It’s tough to do this when you’re in the weeds trying to

Experiencing vs Remembering Self

Ways of Thinking

Experiencing vs Remembering Self

I have learned— if you must give advice to others, it’s useful to think of Kahneman’s remembering vs. experiencing self: Don’t give advice from your remembering self. In hindsight your simplified lessons feel certain; to those experiencing the immediate, they feel irrelevant. In chronological order #1 Do