Architectural Design Motivational Quotes

Simple is complicated.

Jobs’s reluctance to make the Mac compatible with the architecture of the Lisa was motivated by more than rivalry or revenge. There was a philosophical component, one that was related to his penchant for control. He believed that for a computer to be truly great, its hardware and its software had to be tightly linked. When a computer was open to running software that also worked on other computers, it would end up sacrificing some functionality. The best products, he believed, were “whole widgets” that were designed end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa. This is what would distinguish the Macintosh, which had an operating system that worked only on its own hardware, from the environment that Microsoft was creating, in which its operating system could be used on hardware made by many different companies.

ANNE THORNDIKE, A primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, had a crazy idea. She believed she could improve the eating habits of thousands of hospital staff and visitors without changing their willpower or motivation in the slightest way. In fact, she didn’t plan on talking to them at all. Thorndike and her colleagues designed a six-month study to alter the “choice architecture” of the hospital cafeteria. They started by changing how drinks were arranged in the room. Originally, the refrigerators located next to the cash registers in the cafeteria were filled with only soda. The researchers added water as an option to each one. Additionally, they placed baskets of bottled water next to the food stations throughout the room. Soda was still in the primary refrigerators, but water was now available at all drink locations. Over the next three months, the number of soda sales at the hospital dropped by 11.4 percent. Meanwhile, sales of bottled water increased by 25.8 percent. They made similar adjustments—and saw similar results—with the food in the cafeteria. Nobody had said a word to anyone eating there. BEFORE AFTER FIGURE 8: Here is a representation of what the cafeteria looked like before the environment design changes were made (left) and after (right). The shaded boxes indicate areas where bottled water was available in each instance. Because the amount of water in the environment was increased, behavior shifted naturally and without additional motivation. People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are. If I walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies on the counter, I’ll pick up half a dozen and start eating, even if I hadn’t been thinking about them beforehand and didn’t necessarily feel hungry. If the communal table at the office is always filled with doughnuts and bagels, it’s going to be hard not to grab one every now and then. Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you.

Over the last decade, entire neighbourhoods have lost their identity to the ever-growing clothing retail market. Since my first visit to the Marais quarter of Paris in 2003, I have seen the area shift from a charming, off-beat district featuring a mix of up-and-coming designers, traditional ateliers, bookstores and boulangeries to what amounts to an open-air shopping mall dominated by international brands. In the last five years, an antique shop has been replaced by a chic clothing store and the last neighbourhood supermarket transformed into a threestorey flagship of one of the clothing giants. The old quarter is now only faintly visible, like writing on a medieval palimpsest: overhanging the gleaming sign of a sleek clothes shop, on a faded ceramic fascia board, is written ‘BOULANGERIE’. In economically developed countries, people’s motivations for spending money have long since shifted from needs to desires. There’s no denying we need places to live in, food to nourish us and clothes to dress ourselves in, and, while we’re at it, we might as well do these things with a certain degree of refinement to help make life as pleasurable as possible. But when did the clothing industry turn into little more than a cash machine whose main purpose seems to be its own never-ending growth? Just as clothing retail shops are sucking the identity out of entire neighbourhoods, so that the architecture becomes little more than a backdrop for their products, the production of the garments they sell is eating away at the Earth’s resources and the life of the workers who are producing them. Fashion has become the second most polluting industry in the world. And with what result? Our wardrobes are cluttered with so many clothes that the mere sight of them becomes overwhelming, yet at the same time we feel a constant craving for the next purchase that will transform our look.

The Earth Architecture is designed in a way that no Human is powerful, only someone can pretend to be.

time. A new interdisciplinary community of scientists, environmentalists, health researchers, therapists, and artists is coalescing around an idea: neuroconservation. Embracing the notion that we treasure what we love, those concerned with water and the future of the planet now suggest that, as we understand our emotional well-being and its relationship to water, we are more motivated to repair, restore, and renew waterways and watersheds. Indeed, even as water is threatened, or perhaps because of the threat, public interest in water is very high. We treasure it—or, perhaps more accurately, we spend our treasure to access water for pleasure, recreation, and healing. Wealthy people pay a premium for houses on water, and the not so wealthy pay extra for rentals and hotel rooms sited at the oceanfront, on rivers, or at lakes. Those into outdoor sports, especially fishers and hunters, are fiercely protective of it and have founded numerous environmental organizations designed to protect water habitats for fish, birds, and animals. Over the last two decades, spas have become a sort of modern equivalent to ancient healing wells. As an industry, spas are a global business worth about $60 billion, and they generate another $200 billion in tourism. In 2013, there were 20,000 (up from 4,000 in 1999) spas in the United States producing an annual revenue of over $14 billion (a figure that has grown every year for fifteen years, including those of the recession), and tallying 164 million spa visits by clients.12 Ecotourism provides water adventures and guided trips, often in kayaks, rafts, or canoes. Ocean and river cruises are big business. Cities are creating urban architectures focused on waterscapes, happiness, and sustainability. Museums and public memorials of all sorts often feature water to foster reflection and meditation. And many communities are working to transform industrialized and polluted waterfronts into spaces that are pleasant, environmentally sound, and livable.

When he started to build at Tivoli Hadrian may have been motivated by the idea of extending the much simpler villa which was already owned by Sabina’s family in a manner he considered appropriate to his new status. No doubt the design evolved over time and was very different in its final state from what had been intended at its inception. Certainly its collections were enriched by the emperor’s travels; by the time the villa’s 900 rooms were completed, it was one of the most extraordinary contributions to art and architecture that the Roman world had ever seen.

Asylums became haunted by what happened inside their walls and also by the walls themselves: an architecture that was purposely boastful but which spoke of a previous generation with different ideals, economic motives, and attitudes toward the sick. The moment when we were most optimistic about our ability to cure the mind is when we built our most ostentatious palaces to psychiatry. There is a danger, then, in telegraphing too prominently one's utopian ideals via architecture. We design buildings not only for their utilitarian values but to project ideals and reflect our shared values. But these ideals and values are prone to change faster than the buildings. Shifting political fortunes, vacillating periods of excess and austerity, evolving attitudes about how the government should best serve its population -- these all tend to move much faster than the time it takes for a building to outlive its usefulness.

Specific Architectural Topics Is the overall organization of the program clear, including a good architectural overview and justification? Are major building blocks well defined, including their areas of responsibility and their interfaces to other building blocks? Are all the functions listed in the requirements covered sensibly, by neither too many nor too few building blocks? Are the most critical classes described and justified? Is the data design described and justified? Is the database organization and content specified? Are all key business rules identified and their impact on the system described? Is a strategy for the user interface design described? Is the user interface modularized so that changes in it won’t affect the rest of the program? Is a strategy for handling I/O described and justified? Are resource-use estimates and a strategy for resource management described and justified for scarce resources like threads, database connections, handles, network bandwidth, and so on? Are the architecture’s security requirements described? Does the architecture set space and speed budgets for each class, subsystem, or functionality area? Does the architecture describe how scalability will be achieved? Does the architecture address interoperability? Is a strategy for internationalization/localization described? Is a coherent error-handling strategy provided? Is the approach to fault tolerance defined (if any is needed)? Has technical feasibility of all parts of the system been established? Is an approach to overengineering specified? Are necessary buy-vs.-build decisions included? Does the architecture describe how reused code will be made to conform to other architectural objectives? Is the architecture designed to accommodate likely changes? General Architectural Quality Does the architecture account for all the requirements? Is any part overarchitected or underarchitected? Are expectations in this area set out explicitly? Does the whole architecture hang together conceptually? Is the top-level design independent of the machine and language that will be used to implement it? Are the motivations for all major decisions provided? Are you, as a programmer who will implement the system, comfortable with the architecture?

Users aren’t motivated by first understanding the environment. They’re too busy just getting things done, and in fact they tend to improvise as they go, often using the environment in different ways than intended by designers.[

We have all heard the sceptics who warn that serious action to fight climate change and energy scarcity will lead us into decades of hardship and sacrifice. When it comes to cities, they are absolutely wrong. In fact, sustainability and the good life can be by-products of the very same interventions. Alex Boston, the Golder planner who advises dozens of cities on climate and energy, doesn’t even ask civic leaders about their greenhouse gas reduction aspirations when they first start talking. ‘We ask, “What are your core community priorities?”’ says Boston. ‘People don’t talk about climate change. They say they want economic development, livability, mobility, housing affordability, taxes, all stuff that relates to happiness.’ These are just the concerns that have caused us to delay action on climate change. But Boston insists that by focusing on the relationship between energy, efficiency and the things that make life better, cities can succeed where scary data, scientists, logic and conscience have failed. The happy city plan is an energy plan. It is a climate plan. It is a belt-tightening plan for cash-strapped cities. It is also an economic plan, a jobs plan and a corrective for weak systems. It is a plan for resilience. THE GREEN SURPRISE Consider the by-product of the happy city project in Bogotá. Enrique Peñalosa told me that he did not feel the urgency of the global environmental crisis when he was elected mayor. His urban transformation was not motivated by a concern for spotted owls or melting glaciers or soon-to-be-flooded residents of villages on some distant coral atoll. Still, a funny thing happened near the end of his term. After making Bogotá easier, cleaner, more beautiful and more fair, the mayor and his city started winning accolades from environmental organizations. In 2000 Peñalosa and Eric Britton were called to Sweden to accept the Stockholm Challenge Award for the Environment, for pulling 850,000 vehicles off the street during the world’s biggest car-free day. Then the TransMilenio bus system was lauded for producing massive reductions in Bogotá’s carbon dioxide emissions.fn1, 3 It was the first transport system to be accredited under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism – meaning that Bogotá could actually sell carbon credits to polluters in rich countries. For its public space transformations under mayors Peñalosa, Antanas Mockus and their successor, Luis Garzón, the city won the Golden Lion prize from the prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale. For its bicycle routes, its new parks, its Ciclovía, its upside-down roads and that hugely popular car-free day, Bogotá was held up as a shining example of green urbanism. Not one of its programmes was directed at the crisis of climate change, but the city offered tangible proof of the connection between urban design, experience and the carbon energy system. It suggested that the green city, the low-carbon city and the happy city might be exactly the same destination.