The Folly of Promises Before Practicalities

When Reality Meets Design

In a moment of lucid piquancy, we have come to realise that reality has a way of touching realism in ways so radically unexpected that a rethink is required. As I have written elsewhere, in my earlier posts on our laptop remediation activity, the theory and the terrain are rarely the same country.

I say this whilst appreciating the amount of work that has gone into crafting a "perfect" solution, only to find it unsuitable, or challenged by inconvenient situations that threaten the very premises we thought had accounted for everything.

Where Solutions Are Tested

When a solution is put to the test in a real-world setting, you find the gaps in your thinking first; then you discover the ways in which the common, the outlier, the exceptional, or the impossible render your solution inadequate.

In our case, a deployment to just 0.2% of the cohort revealed issues that will remain insurmountable until we have better data. Only then can we skew the solution towards those we can genuinely help.

What unsettles me is the arithmetic of it. If we are already encountering this many blockers with so tiny a group of testers, then the impact on the full 100%, had this gone out early, would have been more than a disaster; it would have been an overwhelming failure of insight and foresight, the very faculties none of us can afford to lack.

An AI-generated infographic on the blog content. (Click to enlarge.)

I remember a comment I made in an earlier blog: "we were working with architects whose confidence outpaced their familiarity with the environment in which their solution was meant to run." To use a colloquialism, the rubber has hit the tarmac and the tacks are flying.

The Value of Restraint

Within this morass lies the urgency to get the solution out, yet our initial reviews and feedback suggest that my reticence has forestalled a catastrophe. Restraint, however, never receives the honour it so well deserves.

We are at an impasse: how do we find normalisation amidst this chaos, so that a subset of the solution's settings can go out to the largest majority whilst we decide how to handle the difficult ones, and whether it is even worth our while to tackle them?

Promise Before Practicality

The biggest failing of this whole exercise is that promises were made long before the practicalities were addressed. The architects gave their assurances to the business before ever consulting the implementors on whether those ideas could be delivered, and that ordering, the pledge preceding feasibility, is where the trouble was seeded.

If you are not seeing through the glass clearly, you should not be gambling on the reality of the little you can see.

So, we do the only honest thing left to us: we wait for the data first, because only the data can tell us who we are truly able to help, and we promise nothing until it does.

Related blogs

Blog - Authority Without Consent

Blog - Badly Designed Systems Are Just That

Blog - You Do Not Get A Painter to Fix Another's Art

Blog - A Picasso No One Can Repaint

A Gemini Notebook AI Podcast on this blog

A Picasso No One Can Repaint

The Mad Hatter's Drawing Board

Every good farce needs its Mad Hatter, and mine arrives armed with a drawing board. That drawing board, the one we have returned to many times over the last six weeks, was the receptacle of imperceptible scrawls by a mad scientist whose antics do not, on the surface, look like a frenzy of demented absentmindedness coupled with a sense of all-knowing confidence.

No, what comes out at the end is what makes this a Mad Hatter you could, in your complete docility, be persuaded to strangle. The task itself was simple enough to state: to improve laptop performance in a tightly controlled environment.

There we were at the end of last week, on the cusp of completing this intensive work of art, in the sense that the automation now had snapshots, verbose logging, and user-initiated rollbacks, all at my insistence, achieved in stages of improvement that registered close to fifty versions of the code.

An AI-generated infographic on the blog content. (Click to enlarge.)

Two Questions

Then two questions, from different perspectives, quite literally upset the applecart. The first was why something that could be done by policy was being implemented by scripts. It was possible because the architect, the same mad scientist, had tinkered with the engine enforcing policy, in what I saw as a neat piece of coding.

The second question concerned supportability, to which I responded that, although there was a spectrum of knowledge available, the code presented a level of complexity that no one would grasp beyond tweaking it. My own suspicion, if I am honest, was that the code would eventually be ripped out rather than developed and maintained.

I suggested it was a work of art, the progeny of the architect, and that you will not get another painter to daub on a Picasso. A good analogy, but probably too suggestive in its reading, because the architect was soon back to trying to fix it. What resulted was a new design for what the code did, and we were back to square one with deployment by policy and preference; twenty-three tweaks had become ninety-two.

Policy Versus Scripts

The policy-versus-scripts argument comes down to something quite practical. Policy carries comprehensible text and well-known, configurable settings that are recognised right across the industry when it comes to endpoint devices.

Scripts, by contrast, are bespoke by nature, and far too many of them end up impossible to maintain or are simply left to function with their faults until something new can replace them. I am firmly on the side of adapting the concepts as designed and moving them into an implementation that others can actually support.

Skimming through the document, I could already see problems, some easy to correct, but others requiring a total rethink. The concept remained the same in terms of what was to be delivered, but there was a paradigm shift in the implementation that could no longer be done in the phases the scripts were best suited to.

A Promise Disappointed

Worse still, the settings from the scripts did not transcribe directly into policy text; I needed a reference website to derive the policy text for each required setting. Then came the realisation that many of those settings from the script had no commensurate policy text at all.

It did not help; it merely exacerbated the amount of unnecessary work that could have been done right the first time. I sense a kind of aversion to explaining or describing anything that has been done, with emails and Microsoft Teams chats substituting for this essential piece of communication that I have requested many times before.

At the end, an XML file that could have saved me hours of work was in the wrong format for ingestion. None of it was helpful; a promise at first sight was, in truth, a total disappointment deserving of excoriation, but I am too polite for that. I have a pattern-recognition insight into things that suggests an Originally Conditioned Distraction (OCD) to fix. At a glance, I saw that an XML delimiter had not been properly set.

Meticulous to a Fault

Perhaps I am meticulous to a fault, but it is to forestall and arrest faults before they cause issues. Erring on the side of caution always trumps bludgeoning through like a bull let loose in a china shop. Many may not agree, but you do not build a forty-year IT career on being reckless, especially after learning from interesting or costly mistakes earlier on.

This remains a work in progress. I am hoping the transition from scripts to policy will hold, though there are the various unhelpful gaps I have referred to the architect. So, I await the response, before chivalry from the Middle Ages requests the violent disembowelment of someone mercifully dispatched before they wreak additional havoc on the peace of our noble workplace.

Related blogs

Blog - Authority Without Consent

Blog - Badly Designed Systems Are Just That

Blog - You Do Not Get A Painter to Fix Another's Art

A Gemini Notebook AI Podcast on this blog

Authority Without Consent

The Weight of Fallibility

Hubris is one of those traits anyone should do well to avoid. Regardless of one's expertise, ability, and confidence, we are prone to error, mistakes, failings, or just the slightest miscomprehension of a situation.

This is not to second-guess the premise; rather, it is simply that an awareness that we may not be entirely correct, and hence fallible, can be a humbling realisation. It shows us the extent of what we intend in our self-belief, and how reality challenges it.

A Rollout Not Ready

Recently, I met the weight of imposition from on high: a process I was neither confident in nor happy to deploy. Developments within the last week have now brought into stark relief that what appeared to work on a single device, with a different kind of user profile, was neither ripe nor ready for a global rollout.

One could snidely suggest that this was a fact posited many times before but ignored because the proposer's office implied an all-knowing mien that would brook no questioning.

Well, it all returned to the drawing board as we identified the kinks in the solution. A new solution has since been proposed that is radically different from the original and contains elements that give one the jitters.

Consequently, we are back to the original arguments of fanciful ideas that appear to work in isolation but require a different mindset when set for a global deployment.

Authority Without Consent

What this episode really lays bare is a simple truth: technical authority without social consent produces brittle solutions. A design may be elegant on paper and hold together in isolation, yet the moment it meets the messy reality of many hands and many machines, it fractures, not for want of cleverness, but for want of ownership.

There is, of course, a counter-argument that imposition is sometimes necessary, and that endless consensus can stall a decision indefinitely. I would not dismiss it. But there is a world of difference between the people who run the environment, who understand its issues and problems intimately, and an architect parachuted into a situation who consults no one, believing they already know everything necessary to fix things.

We appreciate that things need to improve, and we would welcome ideas, insight, inspiration, and implementations to put matters right. The question is whether there is a better way for this to go forward without proper engagement. I would suggest there is not.

What an Architect Should Be

An architect should not be like a bull let loose in a china shop, nor should they be a cowboy riding a three-legged horse. My view of an architect is someone who listens and observes intently, appreciates and understands, then suggests rather than imposes, carrying people along rather than rubbing them up the wrong way.

When you break the social element of engagement that helps take ideas to implementation, whatever concept is in the plan is likely to fail. This is not because people have refused to do it, but because the prospect is not owned by the people who would eventually manage it.

If you are an architect, ensure that this is not one of your flaws. Get the builders onside before you take your grand scheme to town, selling castles in the air that no one can reach, even if they could fly.

A Gemini Notebook AI Podcast on this blog

Maison Tropicale - Grand Projects

The context of grand projects

The most recent grand project in Africa was the 2010 FIFA World Cup and that had its detractors. Many who thought the billions spent on hosting the jamboree could have been better spent on development and poverty alleviation projects.

In some ways, there is feeling that grand projects should be sited anywhere else but Africa until it develops to a certain standard of living before it gratifies itself with something big.

Apart from a major art commission in Senegal, the issue of the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro [1] in Cote d’Ivoire was discussed, this was at one time in the Guinness World Records the world’s largest church.

In context, the Catholics of Cote d’Ivoire are quite proud of this church as theirs in Africa and it was consecrated by Pope John Paul II in 1990.

For the masses and for excellence

As we discussed this, it reminded me of Oprah Winfrey Lady’s Academy for Girls [2] (OWLAG) in South Africa where the American media mogul had sunk $40 million of her own money to create an institution of educational excellence.

Many thought it would have been better for her to create 40 $1m schools instead but I offered the argument that it the job of governments to build schools for the populace and if Ms Winfrey were to spread resources thin in this manner, she would who have to rely on already failing governments to manage and run those schools.

OWLAG as a beacon of educational excellence can serve as a standard of what is achievable just as grand projects that foster pockets of development and create aspirations to raising the standards of living and quality all around Africa.

The springboard of grand projects

Whilst sadly the Maison Tropicale prototypes did not get rolled out to the 10,000 units originally planned they could have provided an upward review of traditional architectural practices and the ease of dismantling the structures could have made for easier provision of housing.

Unfortunately, those were lessons we failed to learn but 33 years after the event in the Nigeria, the villages built [3] for the 2^nd Black Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ‘77) represent one of the largest housing projects ever embarked upon in Africa.

Sources

[1] Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls [akin.blog-city.com]

[3] Festac Town - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

La Maison Tropicale Series

Maison Tropicale film in Amsterdam

Deconstructing Maison Tropicale - Introduction

Maison Tropicale - Ownership

Maison Tropicale - Heritage

Maison Tropicale - Corrupt enterprise

Maison Tropicale - Grand Projects

Maison Tropicale - Corrupt enterprise

Corrupt enterprise

The audience might have worn a wry smile when the camera focused on an interview with one of the top government officials in Congo Brazzaville.

He completely denied knowledge of the removal of the Maison Tropicale prototypes and offered that he only really learnt of their disappearance and the circumstance around the situation at the interview.

It was not convincing, silver had definitely crossed palms for the removal of that structure beyond the payment that was made to the landlady who used the paltry sum she made compared to current market value of the prototype to become a powerful slum landlord developing all the land surrounding the original prototype foundations.

In Niamey, the people seemed to have a lesser claim to the prototype and simply felt powerless in preventing their monument from being dismantled and carried away.

Powerless people

In the words of that neighbor, she said, “Poor people have no power”. This again represents the helplessness of the ordinary African in exacting their rights and getting justice.

In age-old colonial-speak, they gave us the Bible and took our land; in this case, they offered a few bronze coins for the prototypes and sold them for truckloads of gold.

The money they paid would have smoothed the bureaucratic hurdles that would have impeded the opportunities to take the prototypes out of the countries with the blessing of government officials who were supposed to hold African treasures in trust for the people and ensure they are not pilfered for personal profit of as it were art thieves.

The need for reeducation

However, without a strong sense of ownership and an appreciation of heritage very little can be done to generate the activism that would militate against African treasures being stolen out of African for the business enterprise of thieves.

There is a reeducation context to this which should include embracing our colonialist past and what came with it with the greater prospects of proud African history open to tourism and the recognition of our culture in situ.

La Maison Tropicale Series

Maison Tropicale film in Amsterdam

Deconstructing Maison Tropicale - Introduction

Maison Tropicale - Ownership

Maison Tropicale - Heritage

Maison Tropicale - Corrupt enterprise

Maison Tropicale - Grand Projects

Maison Tropicale - Heritage

A lack of appreciation

Moving on from the ownership context of Maison Tropicale, when these prototypes were somewhat rediscovered for the world that would better appreciate them, they were literally derelict.

The building in Congo Brazzaville was like a castle with a moat of overgrown weeds and shrubs, occupied by a lady who returned home after the death of her father to an inheritance that had been usurped by his relations leaving her this structure that no one thought had value.

In Niamey, the building was not occupied but one of the neighbours reminisced saying the building was like a big sister and very good shelter from the rain. This was what she missed the most about the prototype.

What is heritage?

The appreciation of heritage grows from a sense of ownership and it was a revelation when one of the important interviewees said that heritage was an un-African thing bordering on taboo.

One can almost agree entirely with this assertion, there are many historical places in Africa that have failed to realise the level of conservation that exudes national pride at first before leading to tourist interest apart from the Egyptian world treasures.

If much care and attention had been paid to these structures in Africa, it would have been impossible or quite difficult to remove them from their locations in Africa to Europe and other parts of the world.

It is arguable that if the Egyptian pyramids could be transported they might well have found homes elsewhere, the Maison Tropicale prototypes were modular and easy to dismantle [1]; it just needed someone with the means and wherewithal to cart them away.

The pillage continues

Africa has consistently suffered the pillage of her treasures and the removal of these very large structures in broad daylight as late as the year 2000 is more an indictment of our sense of ownership and heritage than of the corrupt enterprise that allowed the action to take place.

It was interesting to see the activism that seemed to follow the removal of the buildings depicted in the film but given the appreciation and value these prototypes have now gained in Paris and New York, I doubt if those prototypes would ever return to Africa

We are left to view the foundations of the prototypes where domesticated livestock graze with the regret of what could have been.

Sources

[1] YouTube - Jean Prouvé – 3D Animation construction of La Maison Tropicale

La Maison Tropicale Series

Maison Tropicale film in Amsterdam

Deconstructing Maison Tropicale - Introduction

Maison Tropicale - Ownership

Maison Tropicale - Heritage

Maison Tropicale - Corrupt enterprise

Maison Tropicale - Grand Projects

Maison Tropicale - Ownership

Introduction

Just over three weeks ago, I attending an event organised by Prince Claus Funds and African Architecture matters that featured the work of Professor Manthia Diawara which included the launching of a book on African film and Maison Tropicale; a film he directed on modernist architecture as a documentary feature by Ângela Ferreira [1].

I have wanted to explore a few themes after watching the film but on now had the time to compile the views into a series of topical blogs.

After the screening of the film Maison Tropicale [2], the director, Manthia Diawara [3] was joined on stage by the architect, Joe Osae Addo [4] to discuss the issues raised in the film.

After a few exchanges between the panellists and number of architects, I got the opportunity to ask the first question from the audience.

The matter of ownership

The matter of ownership in relation to the Maison Tropicale prototypes and the neglect they suffered over the years along with the ease with which they were dismantled and returned to Europe had me concerned about the fact that none of the materials that constituted the prototypes were of African progeny and that might speak to the inability for Africans to associate with these colonial fixtures.

The panellists disagreed offering a few views to buttress their opinions, the first being that the prototypes had been in Africa for 50 years and essentially had become African in context, intent and relevance.

Adapting for usage

We need to own the European parts of our history and heritage just as must as we would what is naturally African. For example, cement is not essentially African; its derivation is associated with stone derived from quarries on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England.

Portland cement has been adapted and integrated fully into the building framework of African architecture such that its historical provenance has been lost to full ownership in the African setting.

Strong as these arguments might be, it is clear that the Maison Tropicale prototypes were neither adapted nor assimilated into contemporary African architecture, else imitations and copies of the prototypes would have been built to fulfil the 10,000 units planned for the colonial times or have been seen to be useful to building programmes that greeted post-colonial independence schemes for housing.

Sources

[1] Ângela Ferreira – MAISON TROPICALE / e-flux

[2] YouTube - La Maison Tropicale

[3] Manthia Diawara - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[4] Joe Osae-Addo - Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction

La Maison Tropicale Series

Maison Tropicale film in Amsterdam

Deconstructing Maison Tropicale - Introduction

Maison Tropicale - Ownership

Maison Tropicale - Heritage

Maison Tropicale - Corrupt enterprise

Maison Tropicale - Grand Projects

Deconstructing Maison Tropicale - Introduction

The event

Last week Thursday I attended an event [1]organised by the Prince Claus Funds [2] and African Architecture Matters [3] in Amsterdam featuring the launching of a book on African film by Manthia Diawara [4], the screening of Maison Tropical [5] which he directed and appeared in with Ângela Ferreira [6] after which he was part of a panel of discussants with Joe Osae Addo [7] engaging the audience on the matters highlighted in the film.

I was a guest of Dr Jeremy Weate [8] at the event and this occasion could easily have been topical or a conflation of varied perspectives from architecture, through modernist architecture, culture, heritage, politics, development, history, colonialism to a social commentary on values and appreciation in contemporary Africa.

The context

Not being an architect or in any design vocation, I did not know anything about the work of Jean Prouvé [9] but in context, he was commissioned by the French government to help with a housing problem in the African colonial territories that would have been the building of 10,000 housing units.

Jean Prouvé created 3 prototypes, of prefabricated aluminium parts to be assembled into houses, these parts were flown to 2 locations in Africa, with 2 prototypes erected in Congo Brazzaville and the other in Niamey what eventually became the Niger Republic.

The story

Ângela Ferreira tells a story [10] in the film Maison Tropicale where she identifies an increased interest in the work of Jean Prouvé in Europe in the 1990s which lead to some curator discovering the Maison Tropicale properties in Africa, buying up the buildings, dismantling them and carting them back to Europe in 2000 where two of the prototypes were refurbished, put on display and eventually one was sold at auction [11] in New York in 2007 for almost $5 million.

She attempts to reconstruct the prototypes but after laying out the constituent pieces displays them as sculptural deconstructed parts of the building - the roof, the walls, the blinds and the doors with a container depicting the sense of transition that conveys the context of the buildings coming to Africa from Europe for 50 years and then being returned to Europe.

The controversies

The action of the removal of the buildings offers a complex mix of histories, of colonialism, modernist architecture, economics, politics, social discourse, African perspectives and controversy – the architecture simply becomes a medium to relay and tell a rather intricate story.

I will try not to review the film as a critic but rather offer my views of the things we discussed after viewing the film addressing the undertones that speak about Africa’s colonial history, our appreciation of heritage and the prospects for a changes in thought towards things African.

I would name a series of blogs – Deconstructing Maison Tropicale and attach a focal point that I would try to address at length what was discussed and what I observed.

Deconstructing Maison Tropicale blogs

Deconstructing Maison Tropicale - Introduction

Sources

[1] AAMatters, Invitation for an evening with Manthia Diawara and Joe Osae Addo

[2] Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development

[3] African Architecture Matters

[4] Manthia Diawara - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[5] Jean Prouvé - La Maison Tropicale - Presented by André Balazs

[6] Ângela Ferreira – MAISON TROPICALE / e-flux

[7] Joe Osae-Addo - Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction

[8] Dr Jeremy Weate’s blog

[9] Jean Prouvé - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[10] YouTube - Angela Ferreira on her film project the Maison Tropicale

[11] The Prouvé Prototype Maison Tropicale Sold for $4,968,000 at Christie's | Home | Art Knowledge News

Youtube references

YouTube - La Maison Tropicale

YouTube - Jean Prouvé – 3D Animation construction of La Maison Tropicale

La Maison Tropicale Series

Maison Tropicale film in Amsterdam

Deconstructing Maison Tropicale - Introduction

Maison Tropicale - Ownership

Maison Tropicale - Heritage

Maison Tropicale - Corrupt enterprise

Maison Tropicale - Grand Projects

Causing Disabling Ignorance

First week over - thankfully

Am I grateful that my first seminar week has is over and one can start all over again in the second seminar week.

It all adds up eventually in the final end of module score, but the scoring is per weekly activity added up at the end rather than cumulative.

Having had a really long break, getting back into the flow has been difficult and stressful. I produced work which a year ago I would not have offered up for my proof-reading, talk less of submitting it for assessment.

This is just not me, but that is now done and gone.

I have a bit of a head start this week and hope to do a lot better and get on with things without ending up in a time bind.

My only big thing is the using Endnote for my bibliography, I am still struggling with the making the Harvard style of reference in the application match up to our customised Harvard offering.

I cannot begin to think of the amount of time I have expended in fine-tuning the stuff only to find that our library has not done any work on providing support for the tool.

No-hard-work man

All my life, I know was born for a labour-saving world, there has to be easier, better, smarter ways of doing things and one has to find them and utilise them.

My voice goes into a shrill at work when inertia allows people to just accept shoddy work on the prompting of an emergency in fulfilling urgency.

We then find that we have urgently implemented a solution that has just exacerbated the problem; I must be from Mars where there is a similitude of joined up thinking.

Call it histrionics bordering on apoplexy, I am your drama queen nightmare if I cannot see the benefits of brain cell activity in a situation – we have architects a-plenty whose drawings would never lift off the paper because they know nothing of the strength of materials.

Intellectual arrogance disabling ignorance

Yours truly is caught up in this papier-mâché of designs that do not work and in the whole time I have been in the company, not one architect, no, not one egomaniac technical ignoramus has deigned to visit to see how their design is not fit for use, but by some manic depressive.

Even I always want to discover where my intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and do well to overcome it. I know too many people who have been overwhelmed. Peter Drucker, I you owe big-time for this amazing insight, I cannot continue to suffer from disabling ignorance.

If only I could say to the disabled – Rise up and walk – my life would also be bliss at work.

How to move from working 9 to 5

Back to coffees at dawn

So, at 7:45 am on Monday morning a senior director of the recruitment/services firm that has just secured a contract on my behalf calls up to take me to my new assignment.

This is one of the few occasions where you see a Dutch executive quite well dressed and obviously well-to-do and knowing his onions about so many issues.

It is one of those situations where I get offered an assignment based on my reputation in terms of what I have done, who I have worked with or who I have mentored. No interviews, but the curriculum vitae and reputation does all the leg work.

I am beginning think there should be ways of quantifying ones stock in terms of reputation, reliability and professionalism as opposed to just having technical know-how and requisite abilities.

LinkedIn Networking

In the last 10 years, I have had the privilege of obtaining employment more through elements of networking than initial introductions; one should probably find ways of making those links work better.

So, I was quite enamoured when a friend invited me into his LinkedIn network and I found I was one of 2 consultants whilst others were directors or owners of their business.

Which just under 20 years of IT experience, I am beginning to wonder how I can make my knowledge work for me without having to be present to enforce the knowledge and do the 9-to-5 shuffle to put money in the bank.

This is the new quest along with finishing my MSc in IT and researching opportunities for doing a research degree in the Netherlands. More importantly, finding a way to change my income portfolio to a knowledge-based enterprise from a person/personnel based profile.

Build globally and change perspectives

Day One showed promise, there seems to be a lot I can bring to the table to help out, but then it only works if those I help appreciate the perspective I have of enterprise infrastructure.

I am an architect who designs with a good knowledge of the strength of materials, drawings should be confidently realisable just as infrastructure design should have manageability, usability and simplicity at the fore.

Support staff should have a dashboard of data that allows then go straight to solving the problem when called rather than spending the first 30 minutes construction the links before addressing the issues.

I am wont to saying that the battle for the reduction of cost and the effectiveness of service is at the desktop.

If you do not have that in hand through standardisation, business application streamlining and flexible management practices, your new implementation would grown in cost of support, personnel and management.

IT cost or asset

Then, Information Technology begins to look like a major cost not an integrated business asset and the bean-counters begin to look for ways to outsource all IT.

That is where Wall-Mart has come of age; their IT is completely integrated, nothing is outsourced. That is the challenge of many a CIO and not many have seen that it is about service and not the cost.