iteration
So that you can get feedback on it and make it better
Fascinatingly, one of the other big complaints people had about agile is no iteration. I don't understand how being in an agile environment makes people less iterative, but somehow that seems to be the case. And I think it's because people misunderstand and think that agile is just about putting features out faster, and not about the important part, which is getting something in front of users faster so that you can get feedback on it and make it better.
The most rewarding iterations
Initial designs for sophisticated software applications are invariably complicated, even when developed by competent engineers. Truly good solutions emerge after iterative improvements or after redesigns that exploit new insights, and the most rewarding iterations are those that result in program simplifications.
Evolutions of this kind, however, are extremely rare in current software practice—they require time-consuming thought processes that are rarely rewarded. Instead, software inadequacies are typically corrected by quickly conceived additions that invariably result in the well-known bulk.
To anticipate all the uses and abuses
Success depends wholly on the anticipation and obviation of failure, and it is virtually impossible to anticipate all the uses and abuses to which a product will be subjected until it is in fact used and abused not in the laboratory but in real life. Hence, new products are seldom even near perfect, but we buy them and adapt to their form because they do fulfill, however imperfectly, a function that we find useful.
When we make a model and realize it's rubbish
Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play with the models. He doesn't like to read complex drawings. He wants to see and feel a model. He's right. I get surprised when we make a model and then realize it's rubbish, even though based on the CAD renderings it looked great.
He loves coming in here because it's calm and gentle. It's a paradise if you're a visual person. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead we can make the presentations fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don't run into major disagreements.
Building is never a straight line
You might think that Mario 64 was built with tickets and sprints, but, according to interviews, there was no master plan, only the principles that the game should feel good and be fun. They started with just Mario in a small room, and tuned his animations and physics until he felt nice and responsive. After that, the levels were also created as they went, with the designers, developers, and director going back and forth using sketches and prototypes.
Building like this is never a straight line. Ideas and code get left on the cutting room floor because part of innovation is questioning whether what you made should exist. The process is cyclical and iterative, looking something like this.
Between the two spaces
It is widely accepted that creative design is not a matter of first fixing the problem and then searching for a satisfactory solution concept; instead it seems more to be a matter of developing and refining together both the formulation of the problem and ideas for its solution, with constant iteration of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation processes between the two “spaces” – problem and solution.
The game discovering itself
We like to think about this process as the game discovering itself over time. Because as iterators, rather than designers, it’s our job to simply play the game, listen to it, feel it, and kind of feel out what it seems to want to become - and just follow the trails of what’s fun.
Deciding what to design
We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start
The most serious model shortcoming is that the designer often has a vague, incompletely specified goal, or primary objective. In such cases, the hardest part of design is deciding what to design.
I came to realize that the most useful service I was performing for my client was helping him decide what he really wanted.
Today, we recognize that rapid prototyping is an essential tool for formulating precise requirements. Not only is the design process iterative; the design-goal-setting process is itself iterative. Knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm. Therefore, goal iteration must be considered an inherent part of the design process.
Embracing the mess
Design is non-linear. At Figma, we often talk about “embracing the mess,” and that really means leaning into the chaos and complexity that makes the design process what it is. Even once you have the seedling of an idea, you need to explore and iterate, then pull back and evaluate to see what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes you’ll scrap an idea after a brainstorm session, and other times you’ll get pretty far with a concept, but still need different perspectives and input to move forward.
Models and iterations
Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs's previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the design's evolution, but it prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored.
The surprising effectiveness of writing and rewriting
An Article by Matt Webb- The act of writing the first draft creates new “essential data” that feeds the imagination and makes possible figuring out the second draft.
- Or: In your head, ideas expand until they max out “working memory” – and it’s only be externalising them in the written word that you have capacity to iterate them.
- Or: Good writing necessarily takes multiple edits, and the act of writing and act of rewriting are sufficiently different that performing both simultaneously is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head.
Asynchronous Design Critique: Getting Feedback
An Article by Erin CasaliGetting feedback can be thought of as a form of design research. In the same way that we wouldn’t do any research without the right questions to get the insights that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to craft sharp questions.
The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
- Two generating systems
- Two types of building production
- System A
- System B
- This has harmed modern society greatly
Two generating systems
Imagine a town of type "A" — a neighborhood, if you like, and allow yourself to consider that it has the quality of birds, moss-grown stones, waves breaking on a small shore, pools in which crabs and shells present themselves. Because of the depth and scope of its structure, this world is almost infinite in its richness.
Compare this imagined town with a more usual neighborhood of type "B", typical of modern property development, where there is a stale and ugly air of repetition. Even when variation is attempted, this variation does not flow from the reality of living. Rather it is manufactured variety — an attempt to create something interesting. But what we feel instead is something flat, without excitement, without the urgent joy of life.
These two kinds of places, then, A and B, are typically generated in two different ways. We may therefore call these two different generating systems A and B.
Two types of building production
There are, loosely speaking, two types of building production. Type A is a type of production which relies on feedback and correction, so that every step allows the elements to be perfected while they are being made. This is not unlike the way a good cook tastes a soup while cooking it, checking it, modifying it, until it tastes just right. Type B is a type of production that is organized by a fixed system of rigidly prefabricated elements, and the sequence of assembly is much more rigidly preprogrammed. This type became commonplace in the 20th century, and is still widely used.
System A
System A is concerned with the well-being of the land, its integrity, the well-being of the people and plants and animals who inhabit the land. This has very much to do with the integral nature of plants, animals, and water resources, and with the tailoring of each part of every part to its immediate context, with the result that the larger wholes, also, become harmonious and integral in their nature.
System B
System B is concerned with efficiency, with money, with power and control. Although these qualities are less attractive, and less noble than the concerns of System A, they are nevertheless important. They cannot be ignored. If we are traveling in an airplane, or a high-speed train, we shall often be very glad that this system is constructed under the guidance of some version of system B.
This has harmed modern society greatly
System A places emphasis on subtleties, finesse, on the structure of adaptation that makes each tiny part fit into the larger context. System B places emphasis on more gross aspects of size, speed, profit, efficiency, and numerical productivity.
However, during the last hundred and fifty years, because of choices that nations and states have made in modern times, System B has become the dominant production system for the environment (for land and towns and regions), largely to the exclusion of System A. This has harmed modern society greatly.
Arcade
Here is an interior street on the Eishin campus, with an arcade opening from the back of the classroom buildings. The arcade steps up as the street goes along the slope. Because the natural contours of the land are preserved, the arcade jumps up, in small increments, as it goes along. Steps are inserted where needed; and in plan, too, the arcade follows a gentle series of curves and bends, following the natural character of the land.
This aspect of a street is not usually present in large construction projects, which typically destroy the natural character of the land, and tend to start with a blank "page" that has been created by perfect grading and flattening.
Transmitted through drawings
Architecture is now only transmitted through drawings. The typical architect does not personally know how to make anything — not buildings, not windows, not floors or ceilings. He or she draws drawings. Some other organization then produces buildings from these drawings. We are, by now, so deeply enmeshed in this way of thinking, that it doesn't sound like idiocy.
The life-giving continuum
In System A, creation and production are organic in character, and are governed by human judgments that emanate from the underlying wholeness of situations, conditions, and surroundings.
In System B, the production process is thought of as mechanical. What matters are regulations, procedures, categories, money, efficiency, and profit: all the machinery designed to make society run smoothly, as if society was working as a great machine. The production process is rarely context-sensitive. Wholeness is left out.
Identifying these two categories helps us sharpen and clarify the range of differences among ways of creating the environment that exist in different societies. And the two categories serve to identify a dimension of great importance: the dimension that runs from more life-giving to less life-giving.
Blueprints
Blueprints lead to the making of things that are abstract, not always based on reality. Once something becomes abstract, it breeds disconnectedness — separation and the inability to connect with our surroundings. People buy houses from blueprints, but then don't like the actual house: "What on earth is this? I had no idea it was going to be like this...etc."
Hopes and dreams
The very first thing we did was spend two weeks just talking to different teachers and students, to get a feeling for their hopes and dreams. These talks were one-on-one and often lasted about an hour, for any one interview, during which we asked questions, talked, probed, explored dreams of an ideal campus, and tried to understand each person's deepest visions as a teacher, or as a student. We asked people about their longings, and their practical needs. We asked them to close their eyes and imagine themselves walking about in the most wonderful campus they could imagine.
Mixed use
Pattern 5.5 – Every sports field is always attached to some building which has nothing to do with the particular sports function. Thus, for instance, the tennis courts may be next to the art studio, and placed so that people entering the art studio are just at that place where the tennis court is most enjoyable to watch.
Secret garden
Pattern 7.7 – There is also one garden, so secret, that it does not appear on any map. The importance of the pattern is that it must never be publicly announced, and must not be in site plan. Except for a few, nobody should be able to find it.
In the mind's eye
In System A, it is always the wholeness of the place that matters. To intensify the wholeness of any place — whether it consists of existing buildings in a town, or of virgin land that is largely unbuilt — proposed construction and buildings must be decided, and that means "felt" and thought through on the site itself. It is really not possible to do it any other way, since the relationships which exist between the buildings and the world around them are complex and subtle.
On a drawing or a plan, one simply does not see enough. The drawn plan does not give enough information. So trying to make decisions by drawing on a plan is doomed to failure. To produce a plan that has reality, and to bring the actual place itself to life, decisions are made gradually, on the site itself, under circumstances where one visualizes the situation as the whole it really is. Step by step, this brings building positions to life in the mind's eye — and so, in imagination, one conceives the buildings literally, in their full size and volume as they are really going to be.
Simulacra and simulation
The situation of contemporary construction is more likely to be that a building still gets its character first as an image, drawn on paper, by an architect's fantasy, a simulacrum which is then physically built in cheap and flimsy studs and sheetrock, concrete panels, cardboard — or in whatever conventional system of construction the contractor has on hand.
Sadly, this is where the dull, lifeless, and stereotyped character of buildings in the 20th century mainly came from. It is also, at the same time, where the wild and fantastic egotistical shapes of the present era come from. They are conceived and carried out as images, or part-images, not as built, solid, made works. These papery, System B things are not conceived and made for the sake of their material reality. The feeling one gets in the presence of these buildings does not fill the onlooker with the beauty or the presence of the material substance.
Power law
Buildings which most profoundly communicate subtle harmony are composed of a complex mixture of materials, with the overall amounts of different materials jumping in a calibrated cascade — typically according to a power law. The relative proportions — the statistical distribution of materials by quantity of total visible area — is critical. It is this specific distribution, not just the mixture, which creates depth of feeling.
Elements of Eishin
Each of the elements in the following list were essential to the creation of every space and every building at Eishin:
- The way each building relates to its surroundings, as well as the ground on which it stands.
- The geometry directed by its position in the whole and its function.
- Working with people who will inhabit the spaces.
- The immensely detailed use of models and experiments.
- The search for beautiful materials and ways of making the buildings that should stand there.
- The careful use of money in a manner that reflects the values of the endeavor.
- Creation of positive space, at every turn, and every scale.
- Placing materials between other nearby materials that are similar, and wedging harmonious materials in-between.
- Interlocking spatial links forming a two-dimensional sheet of courtyards, buildings, and openings.
Our responsibility
As makers of buildings, we architects must start now,
with a fundamental change of direction.
For the last hundred years or so, we have understood
building to be an art in which an architect draws a building,
and a contractor then builds that building from the
architect's plans.
But a living environment cannot be built
successfully this way.To achieve a successful building — one that has life — we
must focus our attention on all the crafts and processes,
and then, as architects, ourselves take direct charge
of the making.
We must take full responsibility
for the entire building process, ourselves.
Unfolding
In short, the architect is responsible for building construction, is watching the building unfold continuously, and is making ongoing modifications as it becomes clear from each given stage, what modifications and changes should be made at each moment. And this is all to be done within a management framework that controls budget and cost very tightly.
Direct management
Direct Management does not include or permit the concept of profit to occur. The management is fee-based, or based as a fixed salary, and all construction costs are fixed ahead of time, and the building design is modified during construction, to make up any over-runs. The manager is not able to move money around at will, or put it in their pocket. At the same time, the design is approximately fixed, but with the understanding that it may be changed, during the evolution of the building, so that subtle adaptations can be included in the emerging building. In the Direct Management method it is the architect themselves and the direct manager who together manage the building works and all on-site construction for the owner.
The problem of schedule
We have emphasized, from the beginning, that in order to achieve really profound quality in this project, it is necessary to be able to modify it continuously, during the process of construction. This in turn requires that the Manager is alive to the fact that important decisions are being faced at every stage, and is aware that one of the most important things that is happening, is the evolution of the building designs, while they are being built.
We have a strong intuition that a general contractor will interfere with this process, no matter what is said in advance. The reason is this: All the large general contractors we have interviewed are strongly oriented to the problem of schedule. Of course, this is one of their strengths. However, we are convinced that they are so strongly oriented to this problem, that they will ultimately kill the life of the project, in order to achieve enough management control to be able to guarantee schedule.
We must get our hands dirty!
We must get our hands dirty!In every work of architecture, the construction details are the heart of the project, and the true makers of the project are the ones who make the details, who make the materials directly, and who are not afraid to get dirt
under their fingernails.
We feel it in our fingers
In System A, there is no architect separate from the contractor. We are builders, simply. As builders, we have a direct feeling about construction. We feel it in our fingers, so it is down to earth. One result of this down-to-earth quality is that everything is somewhat experimental. We make experiments all the time. Sometimes we place a piece of wood this way. Another time, we may like to try it that way. Any time something new comes up in the design of a building, we are very likely to try and invent the best way of building it. This is not a great big invention. Just a simple invention, the way we might invent a way of tying a piece of string, to hold a broken toy together. It is just practical.
Four principles
The essential purpose of Direct Management, as we understand the term, is to create buildings which are whole. This means that each part of the building is right in relation to the other parts, and to the part of the land that makes the buildings and the land more beautiful.
I will try to summarize the real meaning of Direct Management.
- The design evolves during construction. This means that the form of control over designs does not stop when drawings are finished, but goes on, continuously, before, during, and after construction. This cannot be done if architect and contractor are separate, or consider their jobs separately. It will only happen if the person who controls the design at the beginning actually controls the construction, too.
- Flexible cost control. Cost control requires continuous changing of ideas about what is built, in relation to money that is available, and in relation to what has been done already.
- Experience with one's hands. It is also impossible for an architect to have enough knowledge to control the process successfully, unless they have experienced almost every phase of construction with their own hands.
- Love of craft and the joy in the physical process of making. In the old days, making a building was clearly understood as a work of making. In this word, designing and physically building are inseparable. However, in the modern world, design has become separated from construction. Architects think of their work as designing, on paper, with the idea that the building process is a separate process. This is not what I call making at all. A good building can only be created, when it is deeply understood as something which is made, by a direct connection of the act of making, and the act of feeling, with your hands.
Guided by image
In our minds, the drawings we had originally made for the columns and capitals were no more than first approximations of the final shapes. We assumed that we would work out the real shapes during construction, and left the inaccurate approximations on our drawings, just for the sake of the building permit. Fujita, used to working with architects in System B, assumed that whatever was on our drawings must be what we wanted, and must be implemented as drawn.
Anybody who was making those column capitals, if they had seen this "double" capital, and had been free to make something harmonious, would have done it differently. But Fujita's people, in System B, did not know how to be guided by reality. They were guided by "image".
So Fujita, in this situation, was not free to respond in a natural way to what they saw. They were trapped by the image-making process they were used to. But because of this, they doomed their own carpenters to a pretentious kind of slavery, producing whatever silly images they were told to do, without being able to ask themselves whether they were beautiful, and unable to use their own sense of reality to make them better.
Invisible substance
We wanted wood, not only in many visible places, but also in the roof trusses of the homeroom buildings, where they are invisible. Fujita wanted to replace the invisible trusses with steel trusses. They could not understand the idea that it was the actual substance — even though not visible — which would control the feeling of the thing.
A practical and sacred act
The emotional energy of a building can be achieved, only if the artists who make and shape the building are genuinely responsible for the way the building gets its shape. To put this another way around, it means that if we fail to take the practical responsibility for the acts of shaping, the emotional energy of the building will almost certainly be false. If the emotional quality of the building is to be alive, and is to be seen, understood, and felt by the people who live there or work there, then this task must not be handed on to someone else. The life and magnificence of the buildings will come to fruition only if we architects, or master builders, or artists — or for that matter, lay people — any of us — take on the task of shaping as a practical and sacred act.
In the walls and mosses
If we reach such a very ordinary state of daily life, and then back it up with building and construction that comes from the depths in us, then that gradually accumulates our value in the world, all of us together as a whole. Later, then, perhaps hundreds of years later, people will look back at our stones and say to themselves, "My word, those people way back then — they certainly knew how to live," and they would say this because they could see the lingering whispers in the walls and mosses, and could read them, and could treasure them, and would learn from these traces how to live like that again.
Melt
In many late 20th century buildings, the architect focused attention on a few strongly defined elements. Usually, the way the building stood out in its surroundings was very sharp, and intentionally separated from the buildings that surround it.
Real architecture comes about in a different way. If the architecture is real, there will be thousands of living centers; many of them modest, all of them having direct impact on human beings. In this condition, there is an overall wholeness in the building and the zones nearby, but this quality is not aggressive nor too sharp. It rather creates a condition where the building melts into the town, or street, or garden where it is placed.
Umbrella
From the curator's visit to a place that captures all the beauty, depth, and wholeness it attempts.