Architecture & Design in Societies of Control

Mahan Javadi, 2012

Master of Architecture Thesis Proposal

Advisor: Matthew Allen

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end... The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.
- Blaise Pascal

Table of Contents
2 3 7 9 14 15 15 Introduction Scientific Management & The Assembly Line Society of Control The Problem with Statistics The Proposition Index of Select Existing Tools Bibliography

HARDE BETTE FASTER STRON

Introduction
Ingrained in our culture is the belief that efficiency, in all aspects of our lives, is the key to happiness and success. From work to play to exercise and beyond, our goals are to constantly gain as much as possible with the least effort. With higher efficiency, our lives have become increasingly dense; we do more in less time than ever before. We are caught in a cycle a perpetual densification of time, experience and content. Every second is worth more today than yesterday; we are experiencing an inflation in value of time. With accelerating significance, time is our most valued commodity and it has become pertinent to create tools that ensure optimal performance through our rapid and dynamic lives. Currently, there are numerous personal analytic tools on the market that automatically aggregate and analyze the wealth of data we produce online. From finance to productivity to health, these tools rely on the extracting information about us online and cross referencing them to data cummilated from the collective mass. By taking advantage of our existing networks and databases, these tools can derive meaningful inferences about who we are through tracking our goals, habits and preferences. Just as there are tools for personal life management, there exists the potential to introduce tools that provide personal analytics relating to space, architecture and urban form. Through integrating within existing social web infrastructures, a system can be developed to provide a benchmark for understanding, evaluating and discovering new spaces on a variety of scales, dimensions and media.

ER ER R NGER

Scientific Management & The Assembly Line

The systematic approach to evaluating efficiency and productivity became a dominant part of our culture with the introduction of the assembly line and scientific management in manufacturing. The assembly line is rationally planned cooperative teamwork strategy with labour-saving mechanisms. Division of labour is the primary tactic as it is more economical to assign each worker a specific task or duty. Through specialization and repetition workers themselves become seamlessly integrated into the assembly line. The ambition is to transform the human body, as much as possible, into a mechanism. (Giedion, 86-98) As a result of this division of labor, coordination and synchronization between workers becomes a growing concern. The rate of production and speed of mechanisms such as conveyor belts are regulated by the pace of the workers. Frederick Winslow Taylor laid the foundations of what is today known as scientific management. (Giedion, 96) Through in depth analysis of a work process, Taylor would increase functional performance and ease labor by removing all superfluous parts. By choosing the most capable workers and pushing them to their limits, Taylor was able to extrapolate inefficiencies and replace them with more rational, fast-paced methods. (Giedion, 86-98) Initially, scientific management was heavily based on worktime analysis - how much work can be done in an allotted time frame - however, by the start of the 20th century, more in depth methods of analysis were developed which visually investigated how work was being performed in space. Pioneered by Frank & Lillian Gilbreth, space-time studies quickly replaced Frederick Taylors stop-watch methods. These space-time studies represent the path and elements of movements during work. To perform these studies the Gilbreths developed the cyclograph, a motion recorder, by attaching a light to the limb performing a specific task in front of an ordinary camera. This allowed for the movement to be tracked and recorded as a luminous white curve, which was later translated into 3-dimensional wire models. With the cyclograph, the Gilbreths were able to extract a layer of information that was otherwise imperceptible. This set up a convention from which workmen could be taught ideal patterns of movement as well as ways to correct inefficient gestures. (Giedion, 103-104) Todays personal management applications utilize similar conventions by aggregating and presenting dispersed information, in order to provide a point of reference from which individuals can begin to improve themselves.

Automatic Hog-Weighing Apparatus for Use in Packing Houses. (Giedion, 97)

Taylorism demands of the mass of workers, not initiative but automatization. Human movements become levers in the machine. (Giedion, 99)

Frank Gilbreth, Motion Study, 1913

Society of Control
This systematic approach to achieving high productivity and efficiency has expanded beyond the assembly line. These ambitions now dominate every aspect of our lives. Scientific management has reached living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, washrooms, treadmills, automobiles and medicine cabinets. The introduction of data analysis and personal scientific management in our daily lives is indicative of the epoch of our time. In Postscript on the Societies of Control, Gilles Deleuze describes this as a symptom of the shift from the factory to the corporation; or from Foucaults disciplinary societies to societies of control. (Deleuze, 4) In the factory, there was a division of labor between management and workmen. This results in what Taylor himself called the military type of management, with one management technician responsible for several workers: One of the cardinal principles of the military type of management is that every man in the organization shall receive his orders directly through the one superior officer who is over him. The general superintendent of the works transmits his orders on tickets or written cardboards through the various officers to the workmen in the same way that orders through a general in command of a division are transmitted. (Giedion, 99) Disciplinary societies revolve around the individual and their position within the mass. Each individual plays a specific role in the larger system of the assembly line. In order to avoid this command only approach, Taylor provided the necessary departments and reward systems through which workers could make suggestions to improve production. (Giedion, 99) This deviation begins the shift towards the introduction of societies of control. In the 1930s, Charles Bedaux developed a unit of human power (B) in order to determine wages based on labor measurement. (Giedon, 115) In societies of control, the role of management begins to shift from analysis and direct regulation of the worker to creating the motivation required for the individual to strive for innovation and greater efficiency. This methodology instills a mindset that encourages competition between individuals within the corporation. Each employee becomes increasingly responsible for their own proficiency at any given task. (Deleuze, 5) This mentality has spilled over to our personal lives and society as a whole. We utilize the same strategies at home as we do at work. We have become increasingly critical of what we eat, how we sleep, where we go and how it affects our productivity, happiness and efficiency. With the integration of the social web in our daily lives, the amount data required to perform such analysis is plentiful. We are in a position where we now have the resources to harvest this information for our benefit.

Looking at the impact of mechanization on man, we must stress those aspects which bear upon mans very nature. We must sharply distinguish the impulse that gave rise to the assembly line and scientific managment from the human repercussions. The impulse sprang from the epochs imperious demand: production, everfaster production, production at any cost.
(Giedion, 121)

Gilbreth, F. Perfect Movement, Wire Model, 1912. (Giedion, 105)

The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become dividuals, and masses, samples, data, markets, or banks. (Deleuze, 5)
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The Problem with Statistics

Science, which was once a rigorous field thriving on intellectual adventure, is today bogged down in a technological adventurism that denatures it. Science of the excess, of extremes a limit-science or the limit of science? (Virilio, 3)

With automated systems of analysis, we are confronted with the problem of accuracy and resolution. With such systems there is an expanding disconnect between empirical observation and the collection of data. We become increasingly dependent on these systems to guide us without necessarily understanding the intricacies behind their development. In The Information Bomb, Paul Virilio refers to this as techno-science: the product of the fatal confusion between operational instrument and exploratory research. (Virilio, 1) Undoubtedly, there will always be a margin of error and a loss of total comprehension and resolution in automated systems for recording and quantifying analog real-world observation. However, it is a necessary measure since these tools are capable of extrapolating information that would otherwise be incomprehensible to any human. Computers have the capacity to aggregate and process an immense amount of information in significantly less time than we are capable. So just as Gilbreths Cyclograph was able to visually record invisible paths of movement, current digital analytic tools aggregate and record previously invisible paths of information on each individual. Where we have to be cautious is in the application of this information. A common misconception is the belief that statistics represent the most true means of observation. (May, 44) When in fact, statistics represents the line-of-best-fit and does not take necessarily take into account any phenomenon and anomalies that may occur. Furthermore, statistics can represent a median scenario that does not actually occur in the database from which it is derived. Thus, it is important for us to understand the potential risks and downfalls of such systems in order to manage our expectations accordingly and avoid blind faith and reliance on these tools. In the end, however, the success of these products are determined by their results. End-users of these consumer platforms of personal analytics are not necessarily concerned with the inner workings of such systems as long as the results are satisfactory. This places responsibility on the designer and engineer to create tools that either provide superior accuracy, or at the very least, deliver on their promises.

The Proposition
With the expanding fascination of personal scientific management and the increase in the amount of data that is readily available online, there is the potential to create tools that guide users in utilizing and understanding architectural and urban form based on personal user data. By cross referencing the wealth of data contained about an individual online, a lot can be determined about their personality, preferences and habits such as their health goals, preferred cuisines, financial stability and more. The proposed tools will be developed for optimal integration into these existing databases. Further investigation will determine the relevant parameters of architecture and urban design that will be included in this new system and how each will integrate into current networks. The application will explore space at a variety of scales and programs, and provide users with a means of assessing their individual compatibility with varying types of architecture and urbanism. For example, such a system would prove to be helpful when an individual moves to a new and unfamiliar city in search of a home. Using the application, they will be able to find the most optimal neighborhood and type of housing development that best fits their personality, habits and preferences. In addition, the database can be utilized as a design resource in creating and editing architecture and urban planning. At its core, this application provides high-resolution real-time demographics, from which designers can readily extract pertinent information during schematic & design development.

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Index of Select Existing Tools

Facebook Report Fitbit Foursquare Google Account Activity Jawbone Up JEFIT Klout LinkedIn Lumosity Mint Nike+ Fuel Band RescueTime RunKeeper Twitter http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report http://www.fitbit.com/ https://foursquare.com/ http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2012/03/giving-you-moreinsight-into-your.html https://jawbone.com/up http://jefit.com/ http://klout.com/ http://www.linkedin.com/ http://www.lumosity.com/ https://www.mint.com/ http://www.nike.com/us/en_us/lp/nikeplus-fuelband https://www.rescuetime.com/ http://runkeeper.com/ http://twitter.com/

Bibliography
Giedion, Siegfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymuous History. New York, Oxford University Press, 1948. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, Vol. 59. (1992): 3-7. JSTOR. Web. 1 Dec. 2012 May, John J. Preliminary Notes on the Historical Emergence of StatisticalMechanical Geographic Vision Perspecta: The Yale Journal of Architecture, No. 40 Monster (2008): 42-53. millionsofmovingparts.org. Web. 29 Nov. 2012 Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. London; New York, Verso, 2000. Print. Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. London; New York, Verso, 1997. Print. Russell, Matthew A. Mining the Social Web. Sebastopol, Calif., OReilly, 2011. Print. Spiller, Neil, ed. Cyber_Reader: Critical Writings for the Digital Era. London, Phaidon, 2002. Print. Kwinter, Sanford. Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture. Barcelona; New York, Actar, 2007. Print.

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UP