Hello World! . . .Hello?

Is anybody blogging anymore?  

It feels like a stupid time to start blogging.  Like that ship has sailed.  Yet here I am with my steamer trunks like I'm actually going somewhere.  But I'm late to the dock.  People I want to follow all seem to have stopped blogging years ago. Most of the information I've seen about blogging is for entrepreneurs hoping to make a buck off their content.  I hear people complain about being overlooked by the algorithms. It seems like anyone hoping to start a blog these days should accept that nobody is ever going to read their stuff.

The thing is, I need this.  My mind is a jumble of thoughts and dream projects, and ideas that I think are clever - and it kills me to think that after springing to my awareness, that they will just sink back again into the obscurity of my subconscious maybe never be seen again.  Or just as bad, keep poking their heads above water as clever yet unfinished ideas to taunt me and remind me of how little I've ever done.  I need a place to put it all down.  To record it.  To look at it objectively, and maybe build on it.

Well, if that is all I want, I suppose there is nothing to stop me.  Does it really matter if anyone sees this, if that is all I want? I guess not. But it would still be nice to think a person could put themselves out there and be known by someone who reads what they wrote.  I'd like to think that might still happen.

Buildings Learn, Can We?

I've been wanting to read Stuart Brand's book How Building's Learn, for quite some time.  I just haven't been able to get around to it yet.  So naturally I was excited to discover that the BBC had put out a 6 part mini-series on the book.  (You can watch it HERE).

Brand is an author, inventor and designer. He has created a number of lasting institutions, including New Games Tournaments, the Hackers Conference, and The WELL, a bellwether computer conference system. His foundation, The Long Now was established in 1996 to foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

In this series, Brand takes a critical stance against modernist and visionary architecture - promoting instead buildings that are designed to be adaptable over time by the people that use them. Time and again we see, that buildings designed to adapt and change succeed, while buildings designed to be visionary statements about the future fail.

"Every building is a forecast. Every forecast is wrong." - Stewart Brand

Early in the series Brand highlights the folly of visionary Architecture, and promotes the wisdom of building for adaptability. He proves that many architects take pride in the un-usability of their structures, and think that people ought to change how they live, to conform to the design of the building. The problem, he says, is that architects are expected to be.

In a previous post, I shared a post Smart Cities: Transactive Memories - where I contrasted natural forms of collective intelligence with the trend to put sensors in just about everything. Sensors to measure what we like, what we do, and how often we do it. There are downsides to digital surveillance - but I can only see upsides to building for adaptability.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be taking some of my favorite thoughts from Brand's series and sharing them here. I think there is a lot of wisdom here that we can tap for our the life of the church - which is also a sort of building using "living stones."

Here is a list of episodes - links to future blog posts will become active as I share my thoughts on the episode. Stay tuned.

1. Flow
2. The Low Road
3. Built for Change
4. Unreal Estate
5. The Romance of Maintenance
6. Shearing Layers