Eiffel Over

Tag: ForEdgeGame

  • Remote treehouse design

    Sometimes humour serves best to highlight the ridiculousness of a situation. 

    In my last few posts I’ve been exploring the relationship between designers and the ecosystem they draw their materials from. 

    The working thought experiment has been a game in which differently sized design teams compete to build a wooden shelter from fallen branches in a forest. The size and configuration of the team have a big impact on how the teams source and work with their materials. 

    Now, let’s make it ridiculous. Imagine that instead of the design teams being situated on site in the wood, they are instead situated in a cabin just outside the forest. The construction teams remain on site. How would the game work?

    The direct link between designers, the site, the construction team and the environment that the materials come from is broken.

    The first challenge is communicating to the designers what the site is like. This could be done by means of a drawing, or even a video sent to the designers. But any representation is likely to be a partial version of fully understanding the site. 

    Next we need to find a way to communicate to the designers what materials are available. In the game, the materials are sourced from the surrounding woodland. But found materials don’t necessarily conform to easily describable units. We could envisage then a system in which branches are harvested and sawn to make their dimensions easier to work with and specify. In doing so, we lose some of the material in order to ease communication and specification for the remote design team.

    With a list of standard parts the remote design team can then begin their design. They may invite the build team in to the design office for ‘early contractor involvement’. When the designs are produced, there will need to be further meetings to brief the construction team on how the design works.

    As construction begins, the people on site notice the design could better fit into the local environment with some changes, but that would take additional meetings with the design team over in the cabin. And it’s not their own design anyway. They don’t feel like they own it, so they don’t bother.

    Meanwhile, the design team forget that they are in a game and start selling their remote treehouse design services to other people. They have a design that they believe works, and so start using it in other woodlands, albeit with even less knowledge of the locally available materials, site conditions, and fitness-for-purpose of their design.

    Of course, this is a ridiculous way to organise a construction process.

  • Losing edge (on the disadvantages of scale)

    In my last few posts I’ve been exploring the relationship between the scale of design team and the connection with the places they are working with. Today I’ll go into the benefits of smaller scale.

    To explore this topic I’ve invented a game as a thought experiment. In this game, teams of different sizes compete in a woodland to build shelters from materials they have foraged. To form their working groups, the participants of each team form into tight clusters. The catch is that only people on the outside of the cluster – the ones on the edge – can do the foraging. 

    Yesterday, I explored the advantages that larger groups have, and in particular the possibility of specialisation that a larger team allows. But this specialisation comes with costs. A big one is the loss of contact with the surrounding ecosystem. 

    In a smaller team, everyone is involved with foraging, designing and building. This interconnectedness means that the processes can inform each other. The process of foraging informs what materials are available for design and construction. Design itself might be a process of trial and error with the available materials. And the experience of construction can inform what materials the foragers need to look for next. 

    The smaller scale also enables the design process to adapt to environmental conditions. If, for example, a particular material is running out in the environment, the foragers can get something different, and adapt the design. Over time, there is even the possibility that the foragers could notice the impact of harvesting materials on the ecosystem. It could be, for example, that harvesting a certain kind of timber encourages regrowth of other species. 

    This constant, direct feedback loop is much easier to achieve in smaller teams—teams with more “edge,” or more points of contact with the environment.

    In larger teams, this kind of information can still be shared, but because specialist designers aren’t directly in contact with the environment, a formal process for transmitting information must be established. This introduces a risk: if designers don’t experience the environment firsthand, they may become desensitised to the information. Seeing and feeling the conditions on the ground creates a deeper understanding than hearing about them secondhand.

    While this is a post about building wooden shelters, it is a metaphor for our actual large-scale design processes, in which designers have virtually no contact with the environment that they are affecting by their design decisions. Without edge – without strong connection with our ecosystems – it is much harder to work in harmony with those systems. 

  • Building a wooden rocket (on the advantages of scale)

    There are advantages to scale in design teams. NASA estimates that 400,000 people were involved in the Apollo space programme. This scale of operation allows a degree of super-specialisation, which enabled the development of brand new technologies — like the creation of software, a new technology at the time. Scale can be a great advantage when it is focused on one single task – in this case putting a human on the moon. 

    When you have scale, you can have small teams hyper-focused on single tasks without having to spend time doing any of the other tasks that support the work. This kind of focus unlocks potential for innovation and efficiency.

    In my previous post, I described a new game I have invented, called ForEdge. It explores how the size of a design team impacts the way they interact with their environment. In ForEdge, teams of different sizes compete to build wooden shelters in a forest. One of the dynamics I expect to see emerge is the role of scale in allowing specialisation.

    One of the effects I expect to play out is of scale on the degree of specialisation the teams are able to deploy. In ForEdge, each team organises itself into a tightly arranged cluster. But only the players on the outside edge can forage for materials. For a small team, that means everyone can search for construction materials in their environment, but larger teams, the inner team members must stay behind. 

    The opportunity for specialisation thus opens up the larger teams. They can have specialist foragers and specialist designers. Both can spend longer on their jobs and so both can learn to do them better. The foragers will learn where to get better timber. The designers will learn how to design better with the materials at hand, learning for instance the best way to design a connection with roundwood timber.

    I envisaged the game working with competing groups of between 3 and 18 people. Just imagine what kind of structure a team of 50 could do with their potential for specialisation – maybe not just a shelter but an auditorium. Maybe with 100 people in their team, they could have enough specialisation to also make instruments to perform in their auditorium. Maybe a team of 10,000 could build a wooden space rocket and fly it to the moon. But what would be the impact of this specialisation on the woodland that surrounds them? Material for tomorrow’s post.