Series 2 Episode 4: Head, Heart and Choices

Humans are blessed with a range of senses plus the most powerful brain of any species. We make life better when our choices and decision making use both our brains (Head) and senses (Heart).  

The smallest choices can make a big difference to the quality of life if both head and heart are employed together to best effect. 

Transcript

Kevin 0:03

Hello again. Welcome to another episode of Make Life Better by Design With me, Kevin Drayton, we've said that if we're gonna make life better, we need to make informed, educated choices. And take considered decisions. Some time ago, uh, a friend and I were talking about our favourite little mottos to go by, and I said that mine would be a think about it. And he said, oh, mine would be just do it. So I suppose an ideal would be, well, think about it, and then when you have just do it. We are complex beings and we're blessed with a range of senses. Okay. None of which are as developed in any one area as well as they might be somewhere else in the animal kingdom. The obvious one that we think of is sense of smell, where we fall way, way behind dogs. Or even eyesight as compared with a bird of prey that can spot a mouse from miles up in the sky. But as a, uh, software suite, so to speak, our range of senses has got a lot going for'em. And then allied to that suite of senses. We have a brain that, to most other species, must seem as large as a small planet. I, I think we work best when we synthesise all the information. That we can get through our different senses with the computing power, the experience, and the understanding that our brains can give us. So whether it's making life better by design or anything else, I think our best results tend to come from bringing the brain. The head together with the heart. All those sensations and experiences we get through our senses and bring those together. Increasingly nowadays, it seems we're seeing greater polarisation between art and science. Funding for arts courses goes down as funding for science courses goes up, as if somehow they, they're polar opposites and can exist in isolation from each other, which is of course, complete and nonsense. Connect the two and you get something far more interesting than either on their own. And yes, I know I would say this, but architecture I think is the perfect example of this. It is an art and it is scientific, and you can't have one without the other. Well, not if you want your building to stand up and look good as well. So I would say there has to be the trained artistic sensibility to produce architectural ideas in the first place. And then you need the mathematical checks, the engineering calculations, you value checks and all sorts of other things to ensure the building is gonna perform as you require. And another great thing about architecture is the way it engages you in all sorts of disciplines from say, the psychology of colour, right through to something as fundamental as calculating what size a radiator needs to be if it's gonna heat a particular space. In fact, there are very few disciplines that don't contribute to architecture and the range of specialisms whose corridors you can wander at any one time are myriad. Yeah, we have acoustics, we have graphy, we have understanding how autistic minds may experience buildings and how high a carport needs to be to house a motor home, adapted for a severely disabled child's use. And yes, those last two are very directly from my experience. From the point of view of an architect engaging with a project, the greater your knowledge and experience in total, the more chance you have of coming up with a solution to a building problem, which is likely to meet the needs of the greatest numbers of people. And there is something of a paradox in the idea that, well, for me, design needs to be democratic in that it needs to be for everyone or if not everyone, for as many people as possible. But then at the same time, it needs to be. Exciting, innovative, wonderful in many ways. And you say, well, how can you do that if you're gonna make it appeal to vast numbers of people? Surely you just need something which is boring but functional. Nope, I don't think so. We can do better than boring and functional. We can given enough time and experience and I suppose the sort of brain that can provide it, you can come up with magic. Now. When I was a student, we used to have groups of people working at drawing boards in a studio together. Now, if you are below a certain age, you'll have to look up what drawing boards are or were. You would sometimes when you're working in that studio, hear somebody shout out How big is a brick? Now, although there are different types of bricks at that stage of the development of an architect, you could safely respond with the size of a typical brick, which in case you don't know is 65 millimetres tall or high. And that means when you add 10 millimetres of mortar. That's the gunge that sticks the bricks together. A standard course of brick work is 65 plus 10 75 millimetres tall, and you would find yourself doing a lot of calculating with this 75 millimetre dimension to get appropriate heights for openings and so on. Because if you tried to give a dimension that required someone to cut a slice off the height of a brick, you didn't tend to endear yourself to the brickies. Yeah, there were tables produced. Uh, that would tell you very quickly how many courses you would need for a particular height or whatever. Uh, but it's, it's not a bad one to, to work with 75 millimetres. Um, and if you find yourself stuck without your calculator or a chart, you could get by pretty well. Now that's dealing with bricks. On the other hand, you'd sometimes hear somebody shout out, whoa, how big's a beam? And that is nowhere near as easy to answer because the size of the beam that you need depends on a whole range of different factors. Yes, it's true that there are standard sizes for timber and steel beams, but the one that you choose has got to relate to the distance that it's spanning the load that it's taking, and so on. And this interestingly is where you can see the influence of the heart, shall we say, with human beings. Let me, let me explain that. The brain can do lots of fantastic calculations. Put that together with what we receive through our senses and all sorts of other capacities and understandings can arise. By the time an architectural student has completed an initial training, you find that there's a tendency to draw a particular size of beam in a given design situation. It's not been calculated to any great extent. It just looks about right, and so often the intuition behind that decision to just draw something turns out not to be a million miles away from what it needs to be once all the calculations have been completed. The other thing that happens is that you can do all the calculations and you find, you can get away with, let's say, um, a 150 millimetre deep beam. That will do the job, that'll stand up, that'll span the, the dimension that you have. But it looks wrong. It just doesn't look as if it's gonna do the job. And if you go ahead with something like that, it can have a very disturbing effect on the human mind. We instinctively know not only when something is roughly right, but we also know when it feels wrong. And on the whole, it's better not to upset people psychologically if you don't need to. Okay, so what's all this got to do with the business of making life better for us as individuals? As I've said before, given that everything is or has been designed, and most of the time our design input is at the level of making choices between already existing alternatives, to get the best results we need to bring our heads and our hearts together. There it is again, only connect, to give ourselves the best chance of coming up with something that feels and looks right and also does the job effectively and efficiently. One of the best examples and a very simple one is how we choose a writing implement. Now, depending on what the task is at hand, the choice available to us is to terrific. I mean, there are pencils. Ballpoint pens, roller ball pens, magic markers, brush pens, fountain pens, chalks, pastels, wax crayons. You know, you can just go on and on and on. So what you're gonna write obviously plays a huge part in your choice of weapon. The other thing that has a huge influence on the choice is what it is that you are writing on, and don't automatically assume it's gonna be paper. But even if it is, paper is a very general term for a vast continent of different surface finishes, rates of absorption, surface roughness, and so on, all of which influence the performance of a given writing implement. To stand a chance of making a good choice, you really need to know a heck of a lot about both writing implements and writing surfaces. Now, I fully accept that in most cases, people don't feel the need to go into the level of detail that, that someone who hand writes for a living would do. Uh, you know, most of the time perhaps it's just scribbling down a, a telephone message or a quick reminder to yourself what you've gotta pick up from the shop on the way home for supper. And I know that many, many people nowadays dispense with, with pencil, pen, paper, whatever, and just do a voice memo into their phones or, or something similar. But there are still a lot of people who do quickly grab a pencil and scribble something on a convenient piece of paper and it's whatever comes to hand, and you'll be writing on something which is probably like a, an 80 gramme note paper, the sort of thing that just goes in a photocopier and it'll work. And generally gets the job done. But if you explore to even a small extent the options that might be open to you, there is a surprising pleasure and satisfaction to be gained from finding a writing inclement that feels really good in your hand, that actually helps your writing rather than fighting against it. And then combining that writing implement with a choice of surface, probably paper that compliments it, that can take this task, simple task to another level. If, if you really like writing with a fountain pen, but you only have paper to hand, that is too absorbent. The results are nothing like as satisfying, if you use paper of the right absorbency and the right surface texture so that the, the, the ink goes on beautifully, stays on the page and doesn't sort of leak away in great blobs and splodges. People that have particular tasks that do involve writing instruments will go to astounding lengths to choose their preferred weapons for the thousand and one different ways of putting marks on paper or another surface. There are different combinations that work best for a given individual. For the general guidance available, the ultimate choice comes down to how the human responds to the situation. Okay. I accept that's a very small example, but the truth is you can extrapolate from that example to virtually every interaction you have with the world. Now, this is where scale plays such an important part. There are choices and decisions we can make that might affect vast numbers of people. There are choices and decisions on deeply personal matters that are no business of anyone else. At both scales those choices and decisions can make life better, but choices and decisions taken without consideration can have unintended and not necessarily beneficial consequences. Next time, I would like to move on to considering choices and decisions on a broader scale that affect not only your good self, but perhaps quite a few numbers of people around you. And getting your head to move, and your heart from one scale of very personal decisions to another that can impact on greater numbers of people is something that we need practise at. However, until next time when we look at one of these bigger impacts. Thanks very much indeed for listening and I look forward to seeing you again. I say seeing, of course, I'm not to talking to you again in the next episode. Thanks and and goodbye for now.