The Cardinal Sin of Newsletters

I just got a request from a colleague to "help us improve our newsletter." Here are a few thoughts from the ensuing conversation that should apply to everyone:

I generally don't save back-issues of mailings... but I did find an old mailing from last fall on streetcars. Reading right to left and top to bottom, the first thing I see in both that newsletter and your letter today is the left sidebar, which is a pitch for your company... in this case, "Experienced Design Professionals," and previously "We Can Enhance Your Home Designs." Being perpetually short of bandwidth, I'm always scanning the first few words of a document to see whether it's something useful for me. If it is, I'll read more. If not, I stop there.

So when I scan both of these and see that it's a mailing from a friend apparently pitching their services, I quickly conclude that because our relationship is that of colleagues rather than designer-client, it's probably not going to contain information that's useful to me... and so I put it away. But when I went back a minute ago and clicked to view the entire streetcar article, I find that it's excellent, and very useful!

Unfortunately, because you embedded something useful within an apparent sales pitch, I never got to the useful stuff. I'd suggest that you reverse the sequence, and embed your sales pitch within useful stuff... let the useful stuff be the first thing that is seen. If so, then it may get forwarded broadly, carrying your sales pitch with it. But as it is, it likely gets put away quickly.

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New Urbanist Curriculum

Here's a taxonomy I developed several years ago for a rational arrangement of a place-making curriculum. Just curious if anyone has any thoughts on the arrangement of classes?

100 Level: The Core Attributes
NU 101: Compactness
NU 102: Walkability
NU 103: Diversity
NU 104: Sustainability

200 Level: The Fundamental Parts
NU 201: The Metropolis
NU 202: The City
NU 203: The Town, The Village, & The Hamlet
NU 204: The Neighborhood
NU 205: The District
NU 206: The Corridor
NU 207: The Block
NU 208: The Thoroughfare
NU 209: The Building
Next comes the continuations of 100-level courses, using the last digit of the 100-level courses as the middle digit of their continuations (examples below derive from Diversity & Sustainability):
NU 230: Diverse Building Types
NU 231: Mixed-Use Types
NU 232: Housing Types
NU 233: Commercial Types
NU 234: Civic Types
NU 235: Lodging Types
NU 236: Recreational Types
NU 240: Sustainable Places & Buildings
NU 241: Nourishable Places
NU 242: Accessible Places
NU 243: Serviceable Places
NU 244: Securable Places
NU 245: Lovable Buildings
NU 246: Durable Buildings
NU 247: Flexible Buildings
NU 248: Frugal Buildings

300 Level: The Fundamental Tools
NU 301: The Transect
NU 302: Form-Based Codes
NU 303: Pattern Books
Same for the continuation of 200-level courses, where the last digit of the 20x course becomes the middle digit of the 300-level continuations. For example:
NU 340: Neighborhood Types
NU 341: Greenfield TNDs
NU 342: Infill TNDs
NU 343: Greyfield TNDs
NU 344: Brownfiled TNDs
NU 345: Greenfield TODs
NU 346: Infill TODs
NU 347: Greyfield TODs
NU 348: Brownfield TODs
NU 370: Block Parts
NU 371: Public Frontages
NU 372: Walls, Fences, & Hedges
NU 373: Private Frontages
NU 380: Thoroughfare Types
NU 381: Roads & Streets
NU 382: Lanes & Alleys
NU 383: Main Streets
NU 384: Highways & Avenues
NU 385: Freeways & Boulevards
NU 390: Building Types
NU 391: Edge Yard Building Types
NU 392: Side Yard Building Types
NU 393: Rear Yard Building Types
NU 394: Courtyard Building Types
NU 395: Specialized Building Types

400 Level: Advanced Study
All 400-level courses would be specialty courses deriving as closely as possible from the numbers of their immediately more elementary predecessor. For example:
NU 401: The SmartCode (from 301)
NU 432: Affordable Housing (from 232)

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Blogging Homework

What all might change if college students had to turn in their assignments on a blog, visible to anyone? I'm the instructor for an online class at the University of Miami School of Architecture this summer. You can't turn in a physical paper, since none of us are in a physical classroom together. I guess I could have the students email their assignments to me, but that could become a file-handling nightmare. I needed something simpler and cleaner.

And then it occurred to me... why not start a Posterous group, with each student as a contributor? Each time a student turned in an assignment, they would simply email it to our site on posterous.com instead of emailing it to me. What could be simpler? It would be very easy to track the assignments, and they would automatically be arranged chronologically by student. It would also be immediately clear whether work had been turned in on time... just look at the time of the post.

But then I started realizing other implications. For starters, the blog would be public, so anyone could read the students' work. Normally, if you're posting something for the world to see rather than just something for one other person (the instructor) you tend to take a bit more care with what you write. Might that actually improve the students' work? And it definitely promises to be a more transparent way to teach.

As for comments, I'm going to leave them on. Matter of fact, I'm planning to make all of my comments to the students on the actual blog post, visible by all as well. The only thing that won't be visible is the grade, which will be just between me and the student. And the fact that others outside the class can comment is intriguing... not sure how that will work out yet, but there's only one way to find out.

Finally, once a class is over, it's almost impossible to reassemble the work that was done. I've taught a springtime design studio with Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk several years since moving to Miami, and there has repeatedly been a lot of thought-provoking work... but because I didn't write it down, I can't recall most of it now. This method would leave a permanent record of the work of the class, visible long after the students have moved on.

Surely someone, somewhere else, is trying something similar. But I haven't heard about it. If you have, please post the details in a comment here, as I'd love to know how it's worked out wherever it has been tried.

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Facts vs. Truth

It's a fact that I'm sitting at my computer writing this post. But in less than an hour, that will no longer be a fact. I'll finish the post, then get up to get a coffee or something. Facts can be fleeting, enduring but for a moment: the fact of someone's location on a fast-moving train changes every instant, for example. Truth is a more enduring type of fact. It's a fact now, and a fact in the future. I'd like to propose four degrees of truth:

"Entry-level truth," or truth of the least durable sort that we should consider worthy of the word, should be that which lasts for at least one phase of life: infancy, childhood, etc. Perhaps we should call this a "mortal truth" because it may pass away before we do. These are the only truths to which we can personally attest, because we can observe both their beginning and their end.

The second level of truth should be those facts that endure for more than a human lifetime, but not longer than a human culture. Perhaps we should call these "lifelong truths." These truths investigated most fully by cultural institutions and traditions, as they can last long enough to view the entire life of the truth.

The third level of truth should be those facts that endure, so far as we can tell, for the life of our universe, although none of our kind have been around long enough to say for certain. There already is a term for these sorts of facts: we call them "natural laws." These facts have been at the heart of most scientific investigation, and are the longest-lived truths that most sciences can explore, because most of them deal with the physical universe.

The fourth level of truth should be those facts that endure forever. There is already a term for them as well: "eternal truths." Mathematics can reach into this realm, although enquiries here are most often performed by those from spiritual backgrounds.

One final note on time: the longer a thing lasts, the greater an impact it is likely to have. So without knowing any other details, we can say that a fact that endures for an hour is likely to have less effect than a fact that lasts for a year. That's not always true, as facts of immense amplitude (a nuclear explosion, for example) can have a greater effect than much longer-lived facts (grass growing in a lawn.) But if you average the effects of all facts we can observe, then the average of effects of long-lived facts is greater than the average of effects of short-lived facts. In every case, you're multiplying the amplitude of the fact by the lifetime of the fact to get the full effect of the fact.

The same principle applies to truths: mortal truths generally have lesser effects than lifelong truths, which generally have less effects than natural laws. But when we get to eternal truths, a strange thing happens: Because they last forever, you have to multiply the amplitude of the truth by its lifetime, which is forever. So the effect is infinite, meaning that this is the one place where we can say with all certainty that eternal truths have a greater effect than every other truth and fact, because they do not end.

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Patience

The Age of the Idea's prime virtue of patience is directly opposed to the Era of the Company's prime virtue of speed. Viewed from an era where velocity of sales was highly valued, the idea that you might wait years, months, or even weeks for any visible effect seems... well... just a little bit loony. In an environment where "time is money" is taken as a foundation truth of the universe, anything that slows down the machine must be discarded or banned.

The old rules made sense under a command-and-control structure where top management could dictate what happened all across the factory floor. But the factory paradigm is falling apart, and the physical factories are rusting. The dream of command-and-control has been exposed... it's occasionally capable of creating order, but at the expense of the propagation of the best ideas.

The Age of the Idea requires us to relinquish some of that control. We can't just flip a switch anymore and have thousands do our bidding (not that most of us ever could have, of course.) Instead of giving orders, this new age is about enticing people with our ideas... and then giving them time to choose. Because now, it's their choice, not ours. The name of the new game is attraction, not coercion. And attraction takes time.

Spreading Ideas

In the Era of the Company orders proceeded in theory in an orderly fashion from the board room through the company, all the way to the mail room. And there they stopped. Command-and-control can work very quickly, proceeding throughout an organization in hours or even minutes, but it only works to the borders of the organization. Ideas in the Age of the Idea get a much slower start, like the tortoise against the hare. That's because people have to feel enticed to adopt the idea, and this usually takes time. But once some of the people you've introduced the idea to choose to adopt it, then a curious thing happens: they may spread it to people you do not know. Some of them, in turn, will do the same. In the end, ideas that can spread freely beyond the boundaries of an organization can have a far broader effect than an order given by a CEO.

We Do This Because...

It took almost a quarter-century to unravel the mystery, but those four little words appear to be the "Transmission Device" that can re-start living traditions in architecture. This was great news for architecture, but it doesn't stop there. Because people now get to choose ideas based on their virtues rather than adopting orders "because the CEO said so," the "why" is now one of the most important parts of the idea. Considering the merits and making a choice slow things down considerably, but it's precisely the "why" that slows things down in the beginning that can create much greater benefits in the end.

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the Chael-Dover Cottage - What the Original Green Looks Like

This cottage, as much as any built recently, exemplifies the ideals of the Original Green in so many ways. The Original Green is a much broader view of sustainability than today's common Gizmo Green discussions. Have a look and see what it's all about.

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Keynoting My Images

The great thing about every photo I'll post on samouzon.zenfolio.com from now on is the fact that each photo is fully tagged with keywords. This is possible because IPTC metadata can now be embedded in every photo. You see the image on the screen, but with a proper viewer, you can see the metadata. I struggled for years to figure out how to build a database that would allow me to record characteristics of each image in my collection so that I could find a photo later. The great thing about IPTC metadata is the fact that the photos themselves become the database... you don't need an outside database to store the info. Here's the structure of my keywords. Here's a partial list of over 10,000 keywords I use... I add to it every time I need another category, of course. What this means is that if you're looking for terminated vistas, for example, you can easily find them (click the Photos tab at the top to see the images.) Want T4 images, both from the air and the ground? No problem. Or people walking. Or people walking a dog, if you want to get more specific. Want a building part like a porch? A building type like a hotel? Images of sprawl? A River? No problem. I'm even starting to catalog Light Imprint. Have some fun... give it a test run!

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