Reading over Fluteys post highlighted something that I feel is a subject that goes beyond architectural training. I have an engineering background, but the points made are transferable to most professions in the construction industry. For the architects reading this, I can feel your eyes rolling at my stereotypical engineer approach to this subject, brace yourself!
Hopefully on the page you might have seen, or about to, a short video clip?
The series of slides in the clip are based on a random doodle that was tweeted in reply to the the next generation of obsolete professionals, below:
I realised that explaining this would be difficult in just words so I hope the clip helped!
Caveat: This is a gross generalisation and this is just a concept!
So, the x axis of the graph represents time. The Y axis represents level of knowledge. Over time we accumulate knowledge and our journey through our professional lives shapes our learning. For construction based professions who end up in teaching, which applies to most of us. We all pass on our skills in some shape of form. This journey can be split in to 3 phases.
Those 3 phases are School, Work and Teach. The school phase means the formal education of our careers where the fundamentals of our respective disciplines are passed on to us. From there we move in to the professional world and we customise our tools to apply our own way of working, which in general has a positive impact on how project outcomes are reached. From there some of us feel it is time to pass on what we have learnt to the next generation. Reaching phase 3, teaching, for me is where you step off the train and lose sight of the momentum of change. This is not a criticism, it is impossible for anyone to keep up with everything and everyone. The world moves too fast!
In the ideal world, the feedback loop should be feeding into the formal education model and the accumulation of knowledge rises steadily, where the area above the curve in red represents the old way of doing things.
In fact this doesnt happen, as the educators step off the train their teaching is based on the working phase and development stalls.
The area below the curve in blue is the good stuff, the tools we use to get stuff done. Although the wheel should never be reinvented, we have to respect that roles in any profession evolve and the learning is endless. This may seem a contradiction to the stepping off the train analogy but the level of knowledge in this graph is with respect to the relevance of that knowledge.
This produces a delta between what is needed and where we actually are, this is shown in green.
Lastly, zooming out illustrates the generational iterations of professionals and the compounded problem over time and the gap between the ideal way and the actual way gets larger with each over time.
Hopefully, that makes sense if not, questions to @Neil_BIM!
Now with that concept articulated, I can get to my point. Technology is an important part of what we do, but the development of software and hardware is fluid. The influence of the development is a million miles away from the construction industry, but we do depend on it. The commercial drivers behind many vendors of software are almost devoid of helping us deliver on our desired outcomes. This might be why educators avoid them?
The things that will be almost constant over time are the laws of physics and the basic principles of human behaviour and interaction. We are possibly all too obsessed with drawing things and worrying about getting them drafted or documented and forget the core purpose of what we are doing!
The first day of phase 1 for every construction professional should be very similar. No matter if it is architecture school, engineering, construction management and even apprenticeships, day one should be all about the purpose of the built environment. From there learn the principles of the respective discipline and make your own choice on how you deliver those outcomes. Software will come and go but the laws of physics will remain constant!
