IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Designing Situations
Situation 105
Systems-rich situations pose three main challenges to a designer wishing
to improve the experience for their users. First, there are the contradictory
operational and commercial agendas to deal with; second, the designer has
to tackle the impact of complex artificial environments on our physical and
mental states; and third, the design and remaking of these spaces never
stops—indeed, the rate of change is accelerating—so that the project-based
model of design is inappropriate.
The contradictory agendas of transport nodes are by themselves an intractable
problem. The architect is one of the few people—along with the
planner and the economist—who grapples materially with space as a totality.
Everyone else looks after a little piece. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is
‘‘run’’ by five people—but they do not direct what the fifty thousand people
who work there do. The job of those three or four people is to manage
the interactions among the many conflicting agendas of those involved
in the airport’s operation. In such a context, the chances of an architect’s
imposing a coherent and stable design solution are small. We will return
to the consequences of that in a moment.
The second challenge—that of artificial space which isolates us from the
rhythms and sensations of nature—can at one level be tackled by something
simple, like letting in fresh air (as any parent, opening a child’s window
at night, knows intuitively). Window manufacturers are doing a huge
song-and-dance about the fact that their latest high-tech products, some
of which are being used in airports, can actually be opened. Even where
windows remain sealed, letting in daylight is now a requirement in airport
design.
Perceptual confusion is a harder design nut to crack. Countless modern
writers, from Karl Marx, to Baudelaire, to Richard Sennett, whom I quoted
earlier, have written about the alienation we feel in modern places. Urban
anxiety is part of our culture. Psychologists who study the phenomenon
have discovered the importance of what they call ‘‘situated understanding’’—a
clear mental picture of an artificial environment, which contributes
to one’s mental health. An anthropologist, Lucy Suchman, brought
the attention of a whole generation of human-computer interaction
researchers to this topic in a 1987 book, Plans and Situated Actions. Suchman
argued that that people do not just follow plans, such as those made