Nov 1
2010
A recent episode of RadioLab on the subject of cities discusses the importance of difference as a catalyst that allows life to flourish in an urban context. Similarly, the complexity of global systems bring new challenges, demanding that disciplines that have traditionally worked quite separately now work together to find appropriately complex solutions. The result is that the boundaries between disciplines seem to grow blurrier every day: architecture merges with graphic design merges with strategic consulting... Do we gain more by protecting the integrity of our practices from possible deterioration caused by outside forces, or are the possibilities generated in the friction caused by difference too great to ignore?
In your opinion, is there still a benefit to boundaries between disciplines? Why or why not?
Jim gave the final word
Architecture is no longer valuable as just a building to serve internally-defined functional purposes, but achieves value as a key component of the organization’s strategy for meeting the needs and desires of its clients or constituencies. It cannot, then, be separated from the other “media” (and the specialists who design and develop them) by which the organization carries on its conversation with the world, nor from the long arc of organizational development.
Thursday, November 4 at 5:04pm
Love the idea of taking an economics class as ‘mandatory’ for understanding the context within which we all work.
We generally accept ‘the brief’ without thinking much about where the brief comes from so that we can better know where it can truly go.
How do we define a ‘central core’? It seems as though many define it as a particular craft. Especially in the design profession where we generally produce something tangible. Kevin Kelly (http://bit.ly/96NtiE) argues that the “disembodiment of value (more value, less mass) is a steady trend”. In this context, can we master crafts where the output is ideas rather than atoms?
All the tangible things we produce are produced within ‘invisible’ systems. Must we master those systems before we can hope to fully realize those physical things that we produce? Can we hope to produce them in the way that we imagined them at their conception (but that often fall to invisible forces we don’t typically consider)?
Monday, November 1 at 9:03pm
The idea of disciplines seems to be based on 1) categorization of the outcomes rather than the process used to achieve the outcomes, 2) specialized knowledge that relates to the outcome (e.g. materials, construction). In response to Paddy’s question, I of course hope that designers can engage in creating new things and the result doesn’t necessarily have to be tangible. If in fact we are beginning to focus more on the PROCESS and less on the PRODUCT, then I’m not sure if the idea of “disciplines” holds as much value.
Wednesday, November 3 at 3:11pm
Interesting thoughts on the origin of the idea of disciplines.
Quickly checked the etymology of the word, for interest:
discipline (n.)
early 13c., from O.Fr. descepline (11c.) “discipline, physical punishment; teaching; suffering; martyrdom,” and directly from L. disciplina “instruction given, teaching, learning, knowledge,” also “object of instruction, knowledge, science, military discipline,” from discipulus (see disciple). Sense of “treatment that corrects or punishes” is from notion of “order necessary for instruction.” The Latin word is glossed in O.E. by þeodscipe. Meaning “branch of instruction or education” is first recorded late 14c. Meaning “military training” is from late 15c.; that of “orderly conduct as a result of training” is from c.1500. The verb is attested from c.1300. Related: Disciplined; disciplines.
Lots of scary words there!
There seems to be a strong belief in the importance of discipline required to master a discipline from those who are staunch defenders of a particular discipline. And it seems to relate closely to the very real technical mastery required of any specialized area where there must be ‘orderly conduct as a result of training’… which can be interpreted as the mastery of, say, masonry work in architecture.
What’s interesting is that the age of the master builder is dead. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe whose father was a stone mason and who deeply understood the physical dimension of that particular act of building and then carried it into the practice of architecture, is a rare breed as the practice becomes more and more specialized.
Does specialization help or hurt design?
Are disciplines becoming too refined?
With so many ‘specialists’ involved, who ensures that the output is holistically conceived?
Is the idea of holistically conceived, single authorship output dead? At what cost?
Thursday, November 4 at 1:59pm
this won’t be the most articulate response, but your questions at the end of this post remind me of how hospitals are having a hard time right now attracting general practitioners as opposed to specialists in whatever medical field. and an added problem to that, i suppose, is that because the baby boomers are more or less “done” we’re seeing a bubble in age where the average age for people in the US (and the rest of the western or first world too i believe?) is rising, meaning there are less young people to even be general practitioners or anything general in the first place.
and we have this focus on specialization, making money, etc etc that is nothing too new, and we’ve probably talked about all the problems with my generation anyway in some way or another, but certainly i think that those problems combined with the baby bubble bursting or however you want to describe it, i can’t think of an amazing term for it, means that specialization is going to hurt us in some ways as we sort of strangle off consciously or not our generalized “human resources.”
and uhm, the last thing i can think of really to add at the moment is just that i know that isn’t exactly about design but i think that it caries over into the design profession. with the emergence of new technology there is only so much one person can learn anymore about anything. there are so many ways to do everything these days that i think it is hard to be general and have any real mastery in comparison to what other people are doing. part of that probably is just the exposure of artists design and etc. that comes out of the internet and mass media.
we are, like it or not, becoming a species of collaboration, or at least, we are in a lot of fields. architecture is becoming very specialized and team oriented (not that an architect alone ever typically built a house from start to finish), and so too are other things. the medical profession, to go back to that, is too big to ever rely on one person. hell, businesses themselves, i think, rarely if ever work as one man operations.
the world has just become large and more complicated. we know that computer models are becoming more and more important for economics, as an example, though i think that that statement is becoming more and more true for everything, because the world is becoming too complicated to be puzzled over by one person, and perhaps there is too much data to really figure out on our own.
does that have anything to do with generalization and specialization? i’m not exactly sure.
and i’m not sure if any of that is a linear progression or more of a chicken egg scenario. do we need specialists because the world is too complex for one person to do everything? or do we see the world as more complex because we focus on specialization in education?
hm
Thursday, November 4 at 7:31pm
Love these thoughts on the limitations of our own ability as individuals to even comprehend the problem in any sort of holistic way.
It reminds me of E.O.Wilson’s new book about ants called ‘The Superorganism’, which also points to more Kevin Kelly’s ‘Technium’.. one organism made up of many individual organisms where the intelligence is distributed.
It truly suggests that we’ve, by sheer connectedness, moved past the idea of the singular, individual author or problem solver and onto an idea of interconnected problem solvers.
But there remains a tension.
It’s a tension we find in our own work at BMD. Massive Change was really a project about understanding and mapping this distributed system, but is closely associated with a single individual who, himself, was always careful to espouse the idea of the networked model.
Yet we still gravitate towards individuals. We make heros. We crave the simplicity of the singular. This seems to be a function of our individual capacity to understand the world around us, but does this limitation serve the ‘whole organism’ in some way? Does our need to have heros, which suggests a model of the individual, have a purpose if we’re moving towards a distributed model of intelligence?
Thursday, November 4 at 10:23pm
Jim gave the Final Word
In a related conversation with a colleague, recently, we discussed the structure of large architecture and engineering practices and some of the issues associated with their discipline-based organizational model. While there have been very clear benefits to project efficiency and innovation with collocated interdisciplinary teams, there has always also been the anxiety that separation from the members of one’s own core discipline could erode professional competency and currency. It seems that most frequently, then, the commitment to a discipline-based (departmental) practice is affirmed, with an almost inevitable organization-wide decline because of discipline stagnation (uninformed by a wider world) and the resulting slow or inaccurate response to the critical sensitivity of the marketplace – innovative and valuable solutions to what clients are trying to achieve.
Ironically, single-discipline practices at all scales seem to thrive. This may be because their professionals have exposure to a wider variety of project types, a larger network of other discipline master, a spectrum of process approaches, and a greater diversity of problem types, and may then bring a richer experience and more responsive discipline to the task. It may also be because the compensation model is more clearly the project when single-discipline organizations come together to solve problems, whereas internal discipline/department performance metrics occlude the client in multi-discipline organizations (the subject of my referenced conversation with my colleague).
We do seem to be entering a time, in any case, in which those older and larger multi-discipline models (your “master builder”) no longer work. We are increasingly discussing, and using, concepts like work swarms, crowd-sourcing, and others where the organizational model is an ad hoc assembly of clever and creative people dedicated to new, efficient and effective approaches to innovative solutions.
These models seem to place higher value on the specialist. You choose me to be a member of your team because for that project in that context, my skills and approach will bring you and the client the highest value. You will also choose me, I would assume, not merely for the expertise but also for my mastery of understanding how to offer to others and to elicit from others the best we can do by an understanding of how our skills mesh to produce new and differential value – mastery of my discipline but also an understanding of how value from yours is derived.
That blend of discipline masters, then, seems not so much a blurring of the domains or value of each. It seems, instead, to be the perfect model for the challenges that our times present. “Projects,” which have traditionally and conventionally been separately-defined contexts in the lives of clients and their consultants, now seem in best practice to be part of a continuum, or flow, and firmly embedded in the longer-term “job” the client is wanting to do.
As you begin to suggest, architecture is no longer valuable as just a building to serve internally-defined functional purposes, but achieves value as a key component of the organization’s strategy for meeting the needs and desires of its clients or constituencies. It cannot, then, be separated from the other “media” (and the specialists who design and develop them) by which the organization carries on its conversation with the world, nor from the long arc of organizational development.
The architects (and other discipline masters) who succeed in this context will be students open to learning from others and also masters developing very sophisticated responses as their discipline’s contribution to an integrated idea supporting and advancing the sustainability and leadership of the larger client/community enterprise. Leadership will be temporal and contextual in this model, moving from one discipline master to another as the participating members understand and contribute to the purpose of any single project in the larger and longer continuum of organization purpose.
So, yes, to discipline mastery (not boundary) applied in new organizational designs (agile and ad hoc) developed to deliver results both in and beyond the project.
Thanks for asking!
Thursday, November 4 at 5:04pm
The idea of architecture, or the building itself, as simply one moment in a continuum of events related to a particular enterprise is fascinating.
When we consider the material/matter/atoms in this context we see several streams that follow different time frames.
For example, if we consider the continuum of matter/energy for a given enterprise, we have the people, with a set lifespan, the physical material, with its own lifespan, and, say, programs, or practices, with its own unique lifespan.
While the human body has a fairly short lifespan in the scheme of these other moving parts, the material of the building will persist, ideally, long after the people using it are gone. And so too, presumably, will the traditions associated with the institution persist well beyond the occupants.
In this context we can perhaps begin to understand the different focus of each discipline. Architects necessarily think longer term than the people running the organization at a given time because what they’re building will be there for a lot longer.
What if the people running the institutions had a lifespan as long as the buildings they commission?
Thursday, November 4 at 10:33pm
E Howard
Land Use Planner
1
I came to my profession from interdisciplinary programs, and most of my academic training was not in traditional planning mold. One thing that strikes me about my field is that given that it’s relatively small, and given that it’s fairly concrete, there are still a number of schisms that animate our overall perspectives. Many of my colleagues have overlapping training in some other discipline: planner/architect or landscape architect is common as are lawyer/planners and politician/planners. Some of us are disciples of complete streets, some form-based codes. In addition, the tools of the trade themselves differ person to person. While there may be basic topics and theories, some of my colleagues are trained in GIS platforms, some are LEED certified, some can use CAD software.
Overall I think it’s important to adopt a viewpoint. It’s important to identify with a field and a theoretical stand and know that field’s arguments and history, to say, “this is who I am, this is the central core of the work we do.” And to do that you need to devote a certain level of study or apprenticeship, a certain submmersion into that particular world. You need to be of something, enough to know it.
However, to be competitive, one cannot become isolated. Everyone always needs to have new tricks, new tools, new and flexible ways of bringing value to their work. It’s important to learn more about the ways other related professions orient towards your own. There’s a whole lot of added value in finding niches to occupy.
A Marxist international development professor of mine held that the most important thing a true budding Marxist could do was take an economics class, and take a look at how economists saw the world, learn the language and assumptions that are being made from that side. I later saw that people who crossed that invisible line were the ones who invented new metrics, like the “triple bottom line” to measure the impacts of projects- an idea that told both sides that the other had something to offer.
As a result, I think professionals benefit from some “pure” core ideas in any discipline. These are the basic values and ways of seeing that make that discipline something unique and teachable. But outside of that, I think the emerging value is in creativity and individualization, the creation of certain schools of thought and practice, which are served by mixing together of ideas. We need to learn the rules well enough to creatively defy them.
Monday, November 1 at 4:17pm