weeknote 17
It’s hard to top a week like the one I described in weeknote 16. The last week was about starting the school year at Art Center, on one hand, and tying up loose ends in LA to start the school year in Princeton. The highlight of the week: hearing Tom McCarthy read from his novel C, then having brunch with him and a few friends the next day. READ. C. It’s stellar.
At Art Center, there’s a great crew of thesis students in the graduate Media Design Program. I heard the first of what they’re working on. My very favorite part of being a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea was being a thesis advisor: nothing like watching someone’s own project grow and develop and being there as a guide. I’m also really enjoying being a part of so multifaceted a faculty. It feels familiar and new at the same time. Funny (in a very nice way) to see themes repeating in my work and in theirs as they explore their thesis directions — it’s a great place to be.
So then, I packed up a couple boxes of books (they made it, though the box is torn), went to yoga and to my writers co-op, then flew back to Princeton last Thursday. I discovered I’d done a thorough job of setting things up for my return. Can’t say I’ve ever been all that neat a person but everything was tidy in the student apartment I’d moved into in June. When you split time in two places, finding things again is the best you can hope for, but things felt smooth and familiar. I reconnected friends from school, several of whom I’ve studied with for five years, caught up about our summer research and discussed the bigger questions of what comes next — we’re in year four or five of our PhDs, we’ve known each other since our master’s program — what’s the next step? Two friends will enter the academic job market. I’m trying to determine which way I’ll go. Writing the dissertation means that there’s an end in sight, unlike the interminable coursework I did (two years of a master’s, two years of a PhD: nearly 20 courses in four years).
My research on Cedric Price and Nicholas Negroponte this summer is going to help to boil down the dissertation. I’m surprised that I’ll be dealing in some way with Richard Saul Wurman and information architecture, as he defined it in 1976 (it never was my intention). Today, I met with Christine and Ed (advisor & 1st reader) and they’re excited about the direction I’m going to take it. Now to theorize information and architecture. Re-reading this week: Geof Bowker and Michel Foucault.
All of this in preparation for an unhinged October. October is going to be crazy. I’m flying at least 25,000 miles: Princeton, LA, Boston (IBM Research), New Haven, LA, Shanghai (Princeton Center for Architecture, Urbanism & Infrastructure), LA. I’ll probably be in San Francisco in there, too for Institute for the Future. I’m working on being as grounded as I can.
Google Zeitgeist: A Series of Tubes
Last week, I attended Google Zeitgeist and gave the “Series of Tubes” Ignite talk about the history of pneumatic tubes. The event was mindbogglingly stellar. You’ve probably seen some version of this by now, but here’s the latest. (On the Zeitgeist Minds site, they list Desmond Tutu’s talk from a previous year as a related video. Not sure how that works, but whoa.) Many thanks to Brady Forrest and Tim O’Reilly for extending the invitation.
weeknote 16
What. A. Week.
I’ve packed five weeks into the last five days. My head is reeling and I’m exhausted, but what an amazing week.
This week has involved LA, San Francisco and Scottsdale, the pneumatic tubes Ignite talk, a 30 person meeting with an organization I’m working with through Institute for the Future, and the opportunity to give a talk about Cedric Price. I’ve submitted a paper to a conference and turned out an article draft for Design Observer’s Places Journal.
Some highlights:
I got lost in some bushes trying to find the grand dinner at Google Zeitgeist at a resort in Scottsdale and accosted someone for directions. When he responded, I had a moment of oh-my-God-I-know-that-voice: it turned out to be Tom Brokaw. I had lunch with the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, discussed conduits and pneumatic tubes with Larry Page, went swimming at 3 a.m., and gave the pneumatic tubes talk to the greatest concentration of fame and leadership that I’ll probably ever meet.
Talking to 30 or 40 people at Adaptive Path about my research was awesome– I’m so grateful to Kate Rutter and Laura Kirkwood-Datta for organizing it and to everyone for turning up! I’ve wanted to share the research I’m doing about Cedric Price with information architects and interaction designers because it seems so similar. I talked about one of the projects I researched this summer: the Oxford Corner House Feasibility Study (1966), an urban information hub for central London built into a massive former restaurant. Price used information as his central material for the building — a very contemporary idea (consider Mike Kuniavsky’s recent talk at Device Design Day, “Information is a Material.”) I never set out to work on a history of information architecture — a term that Richard Saul Wurman coined in 1976 at the AIA Conference –but Price’s work really is an architecture of information. In any case, there will be articles and papers to publish soon. We videotaped the talk and will make it available as well.
We did a great kickoff meeting with Anthony Townsend, Jake Dunagan and Jim Dator for a project at Institute for the Future. I’ve long admired Anthony’s work (I sent him fanmail on his dissertation) and have wanted to work with IFTF for some time. It’s a promising project and great team. Jim founded the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies — and also wrote for one of the issues of Archigram back when. He’s a central figure in the field of futures studies. (Futures Studies even ties into Price’s work: he considered himself a futurist and was listed in the Futures Directory in 1975.)
Tonight, I’ll see most of the people I’m close to in San Francisco. Tomorrow, I hurtle back to LA, starting my position as a writing advisor at Art Center in the graduate Media Design Program. Then finally, finally back to Princeton on Thursday to start off the school year, to focus and formalize the research into a dissertation chapter and get my apartment set up. I’m only midway through September and already, October is brimming over. I’ll return to the West Coast in October for IFTF and Art Center, attend a symposium on place at IBM’s Center for Social Software in Boston, and put on a seminar in Shanghai with Princeton’s Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure.
And sleep. Maybe somewhere in there I’ll get some sleep.
My good friends at Adaptive Path are hosting a talk I’m giving tomorrow night on my research — on the history of architectures of information. Do come! I’m very excited to be sharing what I’ve been finding. Most of it hasn’t been published or presented anywhere since the mid 60s.
Here’s the gist of my talk.
Today, we’re used to the idea of informational interfaces melding with our buildings. But the idea of architecture made of information has a surprising history.
Starting in the 1960s, British architect Cedric Price created information architecture — or rather, architecture made of information. He designed number of buildings that would be used to navigate information, that could learn from their users and respond to what they did. These included the Fun Palace, cybernetic buildings (1964); a proto cybercafe (1966) and sensor-enabled kits of parts that could get bored and rearrange themselves (1976).
These prescient projects show an architecture of information in the truest sense of the term — information codified and categorized, computers specified for information management, novel interfaces for receiving content — a full decade before Richard Saul Wurman coined the term “information architecture” in 1976.
RSVP on Upcoming.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
6:00pm – 8:30pm
At Adaptive Path, 363 Brannan St in San Francisco
(Between 2nd & 3rd)
Misfits and architecture machines
A few days ago, I wrote about some basics of cybernetics, concluding with a snippet from Gordon Pask’s “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics. “Let us turn the design paradigm in upon itself,” he wrote, “let us apply it to the interaction between the designer and the system he designs, rather than the interaction between the system and the people who inhabit it.”[1]
This idea proved very attractive to two young architects: Christopher Alexander and Nicholas Negroponte. When architects started engaging with cybernetics, they saw new possibilities for how designers would work. Technology would surprise and challenge the designer, would break down design problems into smaller parts, would address issues of complexity.
Christopher Alexander applied cybernetics and AI (among other disciplines) to architecture in an attempt to address the growing complexity of design problems. He noted the difficulty of designing for intermeshing systems, even when the designed object itself (whether something as big as a village or as small as a teapot) seemed uncomplicated. “In spite of their superficial simplicity, even these problems have a background of needs and activities which is becoming too complex to grasp intuitively,” he wrote in Notes on the Synthesis of Form in 1964.[2] The design process he described in Notes required a computer to analyze complex sets of data to define “misfits”—design requirements—that the designer ameliorated by creating a form that solved the problem.
While Nicholas Negroponte is best known today as a technology guru and founder of the MIT Media Lab, I’m interested in his architectural background and the notion of “architecture machines”— evolving systems that worked in “symbiosis” with designer and resident that Negroponte thought would change the making of architecture. As director of the Architecture Machine Group at MIT, founded in 1968, he assembled a theory of how such systems would work in the 1970 book The Architecture Machine (dedicated “to the first machine that can appreciate the gesture” [3]) and the 1975 book Soft Architecture Machines, and a series of computer-aided design tools and programs throughout the 1970s.
An architecture machine, in Negroponte’s estimation, would turn the design process into a dialogue that would alter the traditional human-machine dynamic. He wrote, “The dialogue would be so intimate—even exclusive—that only mutual persuasion and compromise would bring about ideas, ideas unrealizable by either conversant alone. No doubt, in such a symbiosis it would not be solely the human designer who would decide when the machine is relevant.”[4] In order to achieve the design goals and close relationship with the user the machine would have to incorporate artificial intelligence, he wrote, “because any design procedure, set of rules, or truism is tenuous, if not subversive, when used out of context or regardless of context.”[5] Intelligence for Negroponte is thus not a passive quality but an active one, expressed through behavior, and improved over time.
However, building a successful architecture machine proved a much more difficult concept in practice because of the quality of interaction they achieved and their designer’s overall fascination with bells and whistles. The URBAN5 (1967) program was Negroponte’s first, major computer-aided design program that sought to use his ideas about conversation, dialogue and intelligence. In his own judgment, it failed because it could not adapt and its dialogue was too primitive. The shortcomings of URBAN5 led the Architecture Machine Group to develop “The Architecture Machine”—a time-sharing computer that in addition to typical peripherals, had a camera interface on wheels (GROPE), robot arm (SEEK), tablet-based sketching stations and “an assemblage of software.” Negroponte wrote, “The prognostications of hardware enumerated in wanton fantasy have been achieved and even superseded in the actual Architecture Machine of 1974. All too often we spend our time making better operating systems, fancier computer graphics, and more reliable hardware, yet begging the major issues of understanding either the making of architecture or the makings of intelligence.”[6] “The Architecture Machine” was perhaps a failure of its own success.
Today, computer-aided design systems proceed as we ask them to. They don’t jump in and do things for us, they don’t create new layouts, they don’t have conversations with us. Expert systems often fall short: they guess wrong, they get in the way. But have we thrown out baby with bathwater? In the surprises and the challenges of our systems, perhaps we would come up with things we never would have imagined.
[1] Gordon Pask, “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics,” Architectural Design 7, no. 6 (1969): 496.
[2] Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge,: Harvard University Press, 1964), 3.
[3] Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine (Cambridge, Mass.,: M.I.T. Press, 1970), 11-12.
[4] Ibid., 11-12.
[5] Ibid., 1.
[6] Negroponte, Soft Architecture Machines, (Cambridge, Mass.,: M.I.T. Press, 1975), 157-71.
This is one of 50 posts about cyborgs, a project commemorating the use of the term.
weeknote 15
Oxford Corner House network analysis diagram by Cedric Price: a project management tool he adapted for his own purposes in his projects (1966).
These weeknotes haven’t exactly been weekly. I’ve been struggling with blogging when I’m thick in work. I’m heavy in a mix of chapter-paper-article on Cedric Price’s Oxford Corner House and find that it’s really hard to translate ideas outward into something short, immediate and public.
I’m a thesis writing advisor this year at Art Center in the graduate Media Design Program. One of my colleagues refers to blogging and writing about the design process as “being a public academic.” I’m looking forward to talking more to her about it, not to mention actually doing it so that I’m doing what my students are. I realize that it’s one thing to teach students about writing, blogging and presenting their work in written form, but it’s another for me to do so publicly — to let whatever audience comes by into your messy creative processes. Is it that I feel vulnerable? That’s less it — maybe it’s that all of a sudden, people are dropping by and the house is a mess and I haven’t showered and there’s not much to eat. It feels like it’s not organized enough to give someone an idea. What if we thought of writing as desk crits, something we do in design and architecture, and less as publishing?
Right now, I’m in the thick soupiness of writing about Cedric Price’s Oxford Corner House — the point where I feel like I hurl clay up on a table to make enough of it so that I can sculpt it away. At the same time, I’m writing a dissertation chapter, a paper for the ACSA “Responsive Architecture” session and an article for Design Observer’s Places journal. It’s all based on work I did in the archive and almost nothing has been written about the project, so I’m going through hundreds of documents and drawings, trying to come up with my own narrative for the project. It takes a lot of time to just create a narrative, let alone synthesize and contextualize it. I’m making headway.
For Tim Maly’s 50 Posts about Cyborgs project, I wrote “A Network of Constant Interactions and Communications,” the first of two pieces on cybernetics and the arts. This one is a brief bit on cybernetics as groundwork for another on cybernetics and architecture. I’ll write more about Cedric Price there, too.
The project I’m doing for Institute for the Future has begun. I’m greatly enjoying with Anthony Townsend and Jake Dunagan on it and applying some of my areas of research and expertise to a fascinating subject. We’ll be getting ready for a big kickoff next week.
There’s lots more: the upcoming Google Zeitgeist conference, where I’m doing the pneumatic tubes Ignite talk, a talk at Adaptive Path in 9 days on information and architecture, and a heap of deadlines. And there’s trying to be a more public academic, so I’ll write here more.
[This post is a part of a month of Cyborgs, a project started by Quiet Babylon's Tim Maly. It's the first of two.]
To get to cyborgs, we need to start with cybernetics.
Norbert Wiener. Image source: Complex Fields blog.
Cybernetics is a network of constant interactions and communications. Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) coined the term in 1948 from the Greek word for steersman. The term describes feedback — communication and control in systems—where a system obtains information on its progress, assesses the feedback, corrects its course and receives further feedback on the success of the transmission.
The genesis of cybernetics took place in the belly of ballistics and radar development during World War II. It took science and social science, then art and architecture by storm in the 1950s and 60s. While it fell out of favor in the 1970s (one possible reason is Vietnam and anti-technology sentiment, noted Andrew Pickering in a conversation we had a few years ago), it’s making a resurgence today — even turning up as a contemporary topic of study.
No wonder cybernetics proved so very attractive to so many fields: it described all systems in general because all systems ultimately were cybernetic, whether they were organic, mechanical, social or aesthetic. “Any organism is held together in this action by the possession of means for the acquisition, use, retention and transmission of information,”[1] Wiener wrote, making information the raison d’être of any organism, whether a living being, built circuit or societal construct. Cybernetics’ implications extended to engineering, computer science, biology, philosophy, anthropology, art, architecture and even the organization of society—the direction of Wiener’s second book on cybernetics, The Human Use of Human Beings. One key reason for the spread was because of the Macy Conferences (1946–53), a core group that included Wiener, W. Ross Ashby and Heinz von Foerster, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and Buckminster Fuller, who gathered twice a year to explore the science of feedback in the social and biological sciences. The Macy Conference attendees sought to create models of the brain and of living organisms in logical systems, linguistic and information theory and with early computers.
A black box view of cybernetics has limitations, such as Wiener’s model: first-order cybernetics—the cybernetics of observed systems. The model becomes much more interesting with second-order cybernetics. It’s a sort of meta-cybernetics: the cybernetics of observing and participating with systems.[1] Consider a thermostat. On one hand, it is a system that monitors feedback in order to adjust the system to its desired setting. However, the thermostat does not exist in isolation: a human being sets it first.[2] First-order cybernetics assumes that a system is itself a discrete thing, unadulterated by interaction with it. Enter second-order cybernetics, which states any system can be changed by its observation. It studies that the way people construct models of systems, not just how the systems themselves function and learn from themselves. Since people are cybernetic models themselves, their observations are de facto second-order cybernetic.
Where do we see these things play out?
From Making Things Public : Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM/Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, 2005
Stafford Beer, a British cybernetician, applied cybernetics to business strategy Operational Research, “the science of proper control within any assembly that is treated as an organic whole.”[2] In the early 1970s, he would work with the Allende government in Chile on in order to apply his concept as a mechanism for societal control.[3] It culminated in Project Cybersyn, with the Cybersyn Opsroom that you see here. (Eden Medina has a book coming out next year about Chile and Cybersyn, an expansion of her dissertation and her article, “Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile.”
Gordon Pask developed musical cybernetic systems that count as early cyborg hybrids. His 1953 Musicolour machine accompanied musical performers. As the performer or group played, Musicolour responded with lights and movement to the music would change, creating a sort of hypnotic effect for those who played with it. But if the performer became too repetitive and did not engage the machine enough, Musicolour would grow bored and stop responding—the first cybernetic art system to do so. [4] Pask also noted that while people trained the machine, it trained them back, creating a feedback loop in which performers felt like the machine was an extension of their minds and bodies.[5]
Left, Gordon Pask. Right, the Musicolour Machine (1953).
In 1969, Pask wrote “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics.” He predicted that computer-aided design tools would develop into “useful instruments;” the “machine for living in” would predict the behavior of its users and residents and engage its resident’s interest — not unlike an advanced Musicolour machine–and computers would control and change the qualities of material surfaces, using sensors to return information to the computer about the interaction.[6] He wrote:
Let us turn the design paradigm in upon itself; let us apply it to the interaction between the designer and the system he designs, rather than the interaction between the system and the people who inhabit it. The glove fits, almost perfectly in the case when the designer uses a computer as his assistant. In other words, the relation ‘controller/controlled entity’ is preserved when these omnibus words are replaced either by ‘designer/system being designed’ or by ‘systemic environment/inhabitants’ or by ‘urban plan/city’ … But notice the trick … the designer does much the same job as his system, but he operates at a higher level in the organizational hierarchy… Further, the design goal is nearly always underspecified and the ‘controller’ is no longer the authoritarian apparatus which this purely technical name brings to mind.[7]
Turning the design paradigm upon itself produces a new form of architecture. Internalizing the lessons of cybernetics externalizes the possibilities for architecture and for art to respond to the people that engage with it — as we will see with architect Cedric Price’s collaborations with Pask. (I’ve got so much to say about it, I’m in the midst of a dissertation on a number of his projects.) We’ll return to this topic in the next post here on cybernetics and cyborg architecture.
[1] Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine ([Cambridge, Mass.]: Technology Press, 1948), 24.
[2] Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics (London,: Hutchinson, 1961), 15.
[3] Eden Medina, “Democratic Socialism, Cybernetic Socialism: Making the Chilean Economy Public,” in Making Things Public : Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, 2005).
[4] Gordon Pask, “A Comment, a Case History and a Plan,” in Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas, ed. Jasia Reichardt (Greenwich, Conn.,: New York Graphic Society, 1971), 77.
[5] Ibid., 85.
[6] Gordon Pask, “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics,” Architectural Design 7, no. 6 (1969): 495.
[7] Ibid.: 496.
This is one of 50 posts about cyborgs, a project commemorating the use of the term.
as miniaturization becomes total…
Cedric Price, untitled & undated note. O.C.H. folio DR1995:0224:324:002, Cedric Price Archive, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.
Found in Cedric Price’s Oxford Corner House (1965-66) archive: a mobile and miniaturized future. Also: cooking.
weeknote 14
(Fred points at one of the presentation boards for Japan Net. This is one of the nicest parts about being at the CCA: the discussions that happened when other people stopped by to see what I was looking at, or that happened over their material.)
My fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture ended last week. It was a stellar month. I realized every time I walked in the door, I wore a grin and my pace quickened as I headed down the hall to the Study Centre. I will very much miss the place and the people, both the scholars and the people at the CCA.
The overall goal of my trip was to look at the projects that Cedric Price did that had something to do with information flows and communication. In reality, that could mean all of his projects, but given the enormity of his archive, that wasn’t going to be the case. I mentioned previously that I looked at Generator (the subject of my master’s thesis) and Oxford Corner House (a proto cyber cafe info hive from 1966), but I also saw Magnet (a set of urban interventions to instigate different interactions throughout London, 1996), the Birmingham and Midland Headquarters (which reused parts of Oxford Corner House, 1968), Price’s own information storage system for his office (punchcards and a possible computer), Japan Net (series of info pods for Kawasaki, Japan), and McAppy (a construction site safety program, project management system and portable, prefabbed construction huts).
I did not set out with the goal of finding this, but I think Price was truly an information architect — that is, an architect whose main material and media was information. (I also believe he came across the early use of the term “information architecture” in 1968, in an article in Datamation.) Every project begins with this collection of data; the key activities have to do with the structuring of that data and information into categories — and then into physical communication and circulation in the form of a design for a building. He didn’t build many things and it leads me to believe that his practice had more to do with the sum total of all the data and information and drawings and texts and correspondence and charts.In any case, there’s a ton of material to work through that hasn’t really been analyzed or published about, with a few exceptions. I’d like for Price to be as well known to the technology/design community as Nicholas Negroponte and Christopher Alexander are.
In other news, I went to my 20 year high school reunion. It was as weird as I’d expected but also, great fun. Best of all, I reconnected with my high school best friend. It’s been a hard year for friendships and it felt wonderful to realize that Nicole is there and beautiful and doing well.
Tomorrow, I fly back to LA. I’m pondering doing a juice fast. I’m looking forward to going running and getting back to eating healthfully and sleeping well.
The future in the past and past futures
In June, I spent several days in Nicholas Negroponte’s personal archive from the Architecture Machine Group era up to the founding of the MIT Media Lab — working my way through hundreds of documents and taking some 1600 images. I also had the chance to interview him about the early years of his career. He was gracious, if not a little self-conscious to be discussing things he built and wrote as a 20-something.
Looking at the material in his archive, it struck me that I was viewing one possible future, one version of how things might have turned out. For all of the things that didn’t happen the way they imagined, the seeds for many things were sown some 30+ years ago. It’s not a matter of what Negroponte and his collaborators got wrong, it’s what they got right — and more importantly, the big questions that still have not been answered.
Seymour Papert, founder of the Epistemology and Learning Research Group in the Architecture Machine Group, co-founder with Marvin Minsky of the Artificial Intelligence Lab (and creator of the Logo programming language), spoke to MIT news in 2002 about these big questions behind AI:
“We started with a big ‘cosmic question’: Can we make a machine to rival human intelligence? Can we make a machine so we can understand intelligence in general? But AI [artificial intelligence] was a victim of its own worldly success. People discovered you could make computer programs so robots could assemble cars. Robots could do accounting! AI… wasn’t supposed to end up like that. AI was meant for Bigger Things.”
In looking at these big ideas of early AI, it’s clear that the big questions still haven’t been answered — things like, What is the nature of intelligence when machines are involved? How do machines really help us learn? What does it mean to have augmented architecture and augmented bodies?
With so many big questions left unanswered, it puts the hype around everything from augmented reality to the iPad into context. There’s hefty precedent in projects and writings by ArchMach, the MIT Arts and Media Technology group and the Media Lab and its affiliated researchers. The Spatial Data Management System (1979) provided a spatial way to move through information and capture a layer; the Aspen Movie Map (1978-80), which allowed its users to drive virtually through a city (and which was used for military simulations as well): Alexis Madrigal offers recent insight into the project. Does the iPad really revolutionize everything or is it just another version of the 1979 “Books without Pages” (which you can read here)?
My last night in Boston, I had dinner with my friend and mentor, Shelley Evenson. ”I look at the past because it’s the future,” I said, in our conversation about ArchMach. ”Exactly!” she responded. And that’s just it. The big questions of the past haven’t been solved, let alone adequately addressed. In order to look at possible futures, we need to delve into the past. It’s where the important issues were first formulated. These pasts as also futures.
Two quotes, to close, that I found yesterday. The first from George Kubler in 1962:
“Everything made now is either a replica or a variant of something made a little time ago and so on back without break to the first morning of human time.” George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, 1962
and this 1968 one, found in Cedric Price’s archive of his Magnet project, carefully written by hand in 1995.
“IT IS QUITE POSSIBLE FOR THE WORLD
AS WE KNOW IT NOW
TO BECOME UNREGULABLE IN IMPORTANT FIELDS
IN THAT IT MIGHT PASS THE POINT BEYOND WHICH
ANY CONSIDERED ACTION
MIGHT HAVE A STATISTICAL PROBABILITY
OF BEING WORSE THAN RANDOM.
THERE ARE MANY SITUATIONS IN WHICH
TO BE SYSTEMATICALLY LATE
IS TO BE SYSTEMATICALLY WRONG.”
–Sir Geoffrey Vickers, “Value Systems & Social Process,” 1968 (in Cedric Price’s materials for his Magnet project, 1995)
It makes me wonder, are we just replicating the past? And in so doing, are we systematically late — if not systematically wrong?
