emotion – Life in Pixels

I’m entering my sixth year of architectural education very soon. It’s been a long, often frustrating, but fruitful journey. At such a time as this, reflection becomes a key point as the final stretch looms. One of the things that has intrigued me so far, both looking inward to the profession as an outsider (before I began my architectural education), and as a young “newbie” to the professional world of architecture, is this fascination with the all-nighter.

It’s sort of expected that the architecture student must labour continuously on their projects, whether their body yearns for sleep or their mind has become a tangled mess of meaningless mulch. The architecture student is expected to pull off countless all-nighters whilst still maintaining a particular standard of work, and failure to do so means instant discrediting of one’s entire stature as a student studying this field. It somehow suggests that one is not putting in the requisite “effort”, that a little more time spent on the work might have meant a different letter grade – and in an abstract field such as design, doubt becomes a prevalent spectre that haunts the self-critique of ongoing work.

I feel that this fascination is disturbing and entirely unhealthy, both physically, and in its fixation on working hard rather than working smart. The subtle distinction between these two things means the difference between a productive, happy young architect who is energised to start a promising career in the profession, and a burnt-out student who might be on the verge of giving it all up for something else.

A serious paradigmatic shift is necessary to move the mindset from working hard, where the number of hours somehow correlates, to some degree, the quantity/quality of work produced, to the idea of optimising workflows, exploiting the benefits of technology and ultimately adopting a smarter way of getting things done. Of course I’m not arguing for a generation of lazy architects who find every excuse to avoid work. Work is an essential part of our culture, and it’s a fundamental aspect of living, of building something meaningful both to society and to the builder’s life, of leaving a true legacy to benefit future generations. But this morbid fascination with a culture of sleep-deprivation, which itself propagates an aura of anxiety, stress, and unpleasantness, needs to stop. Right. Now.

Much needs to be done in reforming architectural education today. One aspect we can begin with is a critical rethinking of what studio culture is. Lack of sleep and deriding physical and mental health runs diametrically opposed to the kinds of environments that we as architects are expected to produce for the betterment of society.

Judgement of work based on the hours put in does not paint a proper picture of the final product. Rather than overworking oneself in order to satisfy this arbitrary time-centric idea, a more intelligent workflow is needed. This is the exciting part: designing is intrinsic to us, so why can’t we design better means of production? Instead of shirking from advanced computational technologies, this is the time to be adopting those tools. Truly understanding the power of BIM technologies, parametric tools and modern productivity strategies such as Pomodoro are just a few examples of the potentials lurking beyond that sleep-deprived horizon.

It’s time we got over this myth that the all-nighter is a necessity to architectural education, and embraced a healthier, smarter way of learning and working.

To say we’re living in a complex world would perhaps be an understatement. Complexity and contradiction are the pervading forces of contemporary society. So it would come, perhaps, as no surprise that something rather peculiar, yet also seemingly fitting, would emerge from such a unique epoch as this.

The ancient mathematician Pythagoras once said:

Reason is immortal, all else mortal.

Unfortunately, our era has somehow managed to kill rationality. In its place, we have inserted “feelings”. Welcome to the Post-Truth Era.

Post-Truth is becoming the new buzzword in the world of politics – specifically the 2016 US Presidential election. Trump’s ability to use emotive language in passing known falsehoods off as facts has been at the core of his notorious rise in popularity. The Economist has a wonderful article that examines this phenomenon from a political angle.

However, I feel that this idea of post-truth is infiltrating other parts of our society. I’m certainly not arguing for an abolishment of emotion, or for the cultivation of a generation of stone-faced, unemotional robots (although, let’s face it, robots would do a far better job at this civilisation thing than us humans have in the last few decades). But the replacement of all rational thought by pure emotionalism has brought into question our ability to think critically, to closely examine what’s being presented to us.

Rationality doesn’t sound so fun. The word feels like it’s implying you to actually use that computer-thing encased in your skull to do a bit of intellectual work. Emotion, by contrast, triggers soft ideas of pure idealism, of hope and an essentially cleaner path to seeking truth. And yes, emotion is a crucial part of what makes us human, of what defines our character and our compassion to fellow humans. So it’s perfectly fine in some, more social situations.

But when it comes to critical things that affect society – politics, but also ideas, debates, discussions around issues of epistemology, ontological arguments, education, the state of our nation – then it’s absolutely crucial that we still approach these topics from a critical, rational viewpoint. It’s inevitable that our emotional side will, to some extent, factor in our opinions and the reception of other’s opinions. The challenge comes in listening to the opposing or other view, then processing it with a critical sensibility. Or at the least, analyze it critically before passing any emotional judgements.

A lot of what’s happening in our society – both global, and in the local context (South Africa, and the global south in my case) is a direct result of irrationality overtaking our sense of judgement on multifaceted and interlinked issues. It’s when we let our emotions take control that we become vulnerable to the Thought Police (which is another issue all of its own), who will then proceed to slice and dice our very language until it resembles a form that is emotionally sensitive to every single issue affected by every human being, thus emptying it of any credibility, logic or rationality.

Post-truth operates through a series of logical fallacies that inject emotive propaganda, aimed directly at inciting one to make decisions with their heart and not their head. In our constant effort to seek truth, to understand our world and the complexities and intricacies of our society, we need to actually think first. In this era of digital noise, where we are susceptible to a swarm of emotion, of mindless chatter and the sharing of the minutiae of every person’s daily life, have we become so intellectually drained through technology that we’ve forgotten this very primal human trait?

Truth lies in the world around us.

– Aristotle (384–322 BCE)

Tag: emotion

The Myth of the All-Nighter

The Post-Truth Era