This appeals to my inner rationalist, the little voice which makes me an engineer and also resonates with something I have been wrestling with all week. I found it a while ago but hadn’t picked out this section before:
Metrics do not get in the way of being creative. Almost everything is quantifiable, and just the exercise of trying to frame up ecological and labor impacts can be surprisingly instructive. So on your next project, if you’ve determined that it may be impossible to quantify the consequences of a material or process or assembly in a design you’re considering, maybe it’s not such a good material or process or assembly to begin with. There are more and more people out there in the business of helping you to find these things out, by the way; you just have to call them.
Allan here is talking about designing “things” – Looking for metrics (even if you don’t necessarily find them) and quantifying the consequences is a very useful exercise. I would add that second guessing unintended consequences (eg: looking at scenario planning) is a step even further.
mel starrs Diversions design, metrics, unintended consequences
I’m rediscovering Dave Snowden after bouncing him off my RSS feeds in an overzealous fit of ‘relevancy’ during my MBA. Which seems odd now, as cognitive behaviour was one of my favourite topics in the modules where it was relevant. This post is worth reading for this sentence alone:
Humans display high ingenuity when you create a targeting system, and the ingenuity is focused on the form not the objective of the measurement system.
Last week I heard a cautionary tale where targets had resulted in unintended consequences, to the detriment of all parties involved. Sadly, I don’t think the person telling the tale had recognised the link between the experienced outcome with the targets set, and it looked like they were heading off down the same path again. Which reminded me of that famous Einstein attributed definition of insanity:
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
All of which sets me up nicely to review the newly revised BREEAM documentation which will be out later today (we hope). Expect a write up in the fullness of time.
mel starrs Opinion BREEAM, cognitive, targets, unintended consequences
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