Problems produce friction in our lives, but friction can act as a catalyst, pushing us to a fuller awareness and deeper understanding of our situation. “When we circumvent, by whatever means, the demand a place makes of us to find our way through it,” the writer Ari Schulman observed in his 2011 New Atlantis essay “GPS and the End of the Road,” we end up foreclosing “the best entry we have into inhabiting that place—and, by extension, to really being anywhere at all.”14
We may foreclose other things as well. Neuroscientists have made a series of breakthroughs in understanding how the brain perceives and remembers space and location, and the discoveries underscore the elemental role that navigation plays in the workings of mind and memory. In a landmark study conducted at University College London in the early 1970s, John O’Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky monitored the brains of lab rats as the rodents moved about an enclosed area.15 As a rat became familiar with the space, individual neurons in its hippocampus—a part of the brain that plays a central role in memory formation—would begin to fire every time the animal passed a certain spot. These location-keyed neurons, which the scientists dubbed “place cells” and which have since been found in the brains of other mammals, including humans, can be thought of as the signposts the brain uses to mark out a territory. Every time you enter a new place, whether a city square or the kitchen of a neighbor’s house, the area is quickly mapped out with place cells. The cells, as O’Keefe has explained, appear to be activated by a variety of sensory signals, including visual, auditory, and tactile cues, “each of which can be perceived when the animal is in a particular part of the environment.”16
More recently, in 2005, a team of Norwegian neuroscientists, led by the couple Edvard and May-Britt Moser, discovered a different set of neurons involved in charting, measuring, and navigating space, which they named “grid cells.” Located in the entorhinal cortex, a region closely related to the hippocampus, the cells create in the brain a precise geographic grid of space, consisting of an array of regularly spaced, equilateral triangles. The Mosers compared the grid to a sheet of graph paper in the mind, on which an animal’s location is traced as it moves about.17 Whereas place cells map out specific locations, grid cells provide a more abstract map of space that remains the same wherever an animal goes, providing an inner sense of dead reckoning. (Grid cells have been found in the brains of several mammal species; recent experiments with brain-implanted electrodes indicate that humans have them too.18) Working in tandem, and drawing on signals from other neurons that monitor bodily direction and motion, place and grid cells act, in the words of the science writer James Gorman, “as a kind of built-in navigation system that is at the very heart of how animals know where they are, where they are going and where they have been.”19
In addition to their role in navigation, the specialized cells appear to be involved more generally in the formation of memories, particularly memories of events and experiences. In fact, O’Keefe and the Mosers, as well as other scientists, have begun to theorize that the “mental travel” of memory is governed by the same brain systems that enable us to get around in the world. In a 2013 article in Nature Neuroscience, Edvard Moser and his colleague György Buzsáki provided extensive experimental evidence that “the neuronal mechanisms that evolved to define the spatial relationship among landmarks can also serve to embody associations among objects, events and other types of factual information.” Out of such associations we weave the memories of our lives. It may well be that the brain’s navigational sense—its ancient, intricate way of plotting and recording movement through space—is the evolutionary font of all memory.20
What’s more than a little scary is what happens when that font goes dry. Our spatial sense tends to deteriorate as we get older, and in the worst cases we lose it altogether.21 One of the earliest and most debilitating symptoms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, is hippocampal and entorhinal degeneration and the consequent loss of locational memory.22 Victims begin to forget where they are. Véronique Bohbot, a research psychiatrist and memory expert at McGill University in Montreal, has conducted studies demonstrating that the way people exercise their navigational skills influences the functioning and even the size of the hippocampus—and may provide protection against the deterioration of memory.23 The harder people work at building cognitive maps of space, the stronger their underlying memory circuits seem to become. They can actually grow gray matter in the hippocampus—a phenomenon documented in London cab drivers—in a way that’s analogous to the building of muscle mass through physical exertion. But when they simply follow turn-by-turn instructions in “a robotic fashion,” Bohbot warns, they don’t “stimulate their hippocampus” and as a result may leave themselves more susceptible to memory loss.24 Bohbot worries that, should the hippocampus begin to atrophy from a lack of use in navigation, the result could be a general loss of memory and a growing risk of dementia. “Society is geared in many ways toward shrinking the hippocampus,” she told an interviewer. “In the next twenty years, I think we’re going to see dementia occurring earlier and earlier.”25
Even if we routinely use GPS devices when driving and walking outdoors, it’s been suggested, we’ll still have to rely on our own minds to get around when we’re walking through buildings and other places that GPS signals can’t reach. The mental exercise of indoor navigation, the theory goes, may help protect the functioning of our hippocampus and related neural circuits. While that argument may have been reassuring a few years ago, it is less so today. Hungry for more data on people’s whereabouts and eager for more opportunities to distribute advertising and other messages keyed to their location, software and smartphone companies are rushing to extend the scope of their computer-mapping tools to indoor areas like airports, malls, and office buildings.
Google has already incorporated thousands of floor plans into its mapping services, and it has begun sending its Street View photographers into shops, offices, museums, and even monasteries to create detailed maps and panoramas of enclosed spaces. The company is also developing a technology, code-named Tango, that uses motion sensors and cameras in people’s smartphones to generate three-dimensional maps of buildings and rooms. In early 2013, Apple acquired WiFiSlam, an indoor mapping company that had invented a way to use ambient WiFi and Bluetooth signals, rather than GPS transmissions, to pinpoint a person’s location to within a few inches. Apple quickly incorporated the technology into the iBeacon feature now built into its iPhones and iPads. Scattered around stores and other spaces, iBeacon transmitters act as artificial place cells, activating whenever a person comes within range. They herald the onset of what Wired magazine calls “microlocation” tracking.26
Indoor mapping promises to ratchet up our dependence on computer navigation and further limit our opportunities for getting around on our own. Should personal head-up displays, such as Google Glass, come into wide use, we would always have easy and immediate access to turn-by-turn instructions. We’d receive, as Google’s Michael Jones puts it, “a continuous stream of guidance,” directing us everywhere we want to go.27 Google and Mercedes-Benz are already collaborating on an app that will link a Glass headset to a driver’s in-dash GPS unit, enabling what the carmaker calls “door-to-door navigation.”28 With the GPS goddess whispering in our ear, or beaming her signals onto our retinas, we’ll rarely, if ever, have to exercise our mental mapping skills.
Bohbot and other researchers emphasize that more research needs to be done before we’ll know for sure whether long-term use of GPS devices weakens memory and raises the risk of senility. But given all we’ve learned about the close links between navigation, the hippocampus, and memory, it is entirely plausible that avoiding the work of figuring out where we are and where we’re going may have unforeseen and less-than-salubrious consequences. Because memory is what enables us not only to recall past events but to respond intelligently to present events and plan for future ones, any degradation in its functioning would tend to diminish the quality of our liv
es.
Through hundreds of thousands of years, evolution has fit our bodies and minds to the environment. We’ve been formed by being, to appropriate a couple of lines from the poet Wordsworth,
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
The automation of wayfinding distances us from the environment that shaped us. It encourages us to observe and manipulate symbols on screens rather than attend to real things in real places. The labors our obliging digital deities would have us see as mere drudgery may turn out to be vital to our fitness, happiness, and well-being. So Who cares? probably isn’t the right question. What we should be asking ourselves is, How far from the world do we want to retreat?
THAT’S A question the people who design buildings and public spaces have been grappling with for years. If aviators were the first professionals to experience the full force of computer automation, architects and other designers weren’t far behind. In the early 1960s, a young computer engineer at MIT named Ivan Sutherland invented Sketchpad, a revolutionary software application for drawing and drafting that was the first program to employ a graphical user interface. Sketchpad set the stage for the development of computer-aided design, or CAD. After CAD programs were adapted to run on personal computers in the 1980s, design applications that automated the creation of two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional models proliferated. The programs quickly became essential tools for architects, not to mention product designers, graphic artists, and civil engineers. By the start of the twenty-first century, as William J. Mitchell, the late dean of MIT’s architecture school, observed, “architectural practice without CAD technology had become as unimaginable as writing without a word processor.”29 The new software tools changed, in ways that are still playing out today, the process, character, and style of design. The recent history of the architectural trade provides a view into automation’s influence not only on spatial perception but on creative work.
Architecture is an elegant occupation. It combines the artist’s pursuit of beauty with the craftsman’s attentiveness to function, while also requiring a sensitivity to financial, technical, and other practical constraints. “Architecture is at the edge, between art and anthropology, between society and science, technology and history,” explains the Italian architect Renzo Piano, designer of the Pompidou Center in Paris and the New York Times Building in Manhattan. “Sometimes it’s humanistic and sometimes it’s materialistic.”30 The work of an architect bridges the imaginative mind and the calculative mind, two ways of thinking that are often in tension, if not outright conflict. Since most of us spend most of our time in designed spaces—the constructed world at this point feels more natural to us than nature itself—architecture also exerts a deep if sometimes unappreciated influence over us, individually and collectively. Good architecture elevates life, while bad or mediocre architecture diminishes or cheapens it. Even small details like the size and placement of a window or an air vent can have a big effect on the aesthetics, usefulness, and efficiency of a building—and the comfort and mood of those inside it. “We shape our buildings,” remarked Winston Churchill, “and afterwards our buildings shape us.”31
While computer-generated plans can breed complacency when it comes to checking measurements, design software has in general made architecture firms more efficient. CAD systems have sped up and simplified the production of construction documents and made it easier for architects to share their plans with clients, engineers, contractors, and public officials. Manufacturers can now use architects’ CAD files to program robots to fabricate building components, allowing for greater customization of materials while also cutting out time-consuming data-entry and review steps. The systems give architects a comprehensive view of a complex project, encompassing its floor plans, elevations, and materials as well as its various systems for heating and cooling, electricity, lighting, and plumbing. The ripple effects of changes in a design can be seen immediately, in a way that wasn’t possible when plans took the form of a large stack of paper documents. Drawing on a computer’s ability to incorporate all sorts of variables into its calculations, architects can estimate with precision the energy efficiency of their structures under many conditions, fulfilling a need of ever greater concern to the building trade and society in general. Detailed 3-D computer renderings and animations have also proved invaluable as a means for visualizing the exterior and interior of a building. Clients can be led on virtual walk-throughs and fly-throughs long before construction begins.
Beyond the practical benefits, the speed and precision of CAD calculations and visualizations have given architects and engineers the chance to experiment with new forms, shapes, and materials. Buildings that once existed only in the imagination are now being built. Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project, a Seattle museum that looks like a collection of wax sculptures melting in the sun, would not exist were it not for computers. Although Gehry’s original design took the form of a physical model, fashioned from wood and cardboard, translating the model’s intricate, fluid shapes into construction plans could not be done by hand. It required a powerful CAD system—originally developed by the French firm Dassault to design jet aircraft—that could scan the model digitally and express its whimsy as a set of numbers. The materials for the building were so various and oddly shaped that their fabrication had to be automated too. The thousands of intricately fitted panels that form the museum’s stainless-steel and aluminum facade were cut according to measurements calculated by the CAD program and fed directly into a computer-aided manufacturing system.
Gehry has long operated on architecture’s technological frontier, but his practice of building models by hand is itself starting to seem archaic. As young architects have become more adept with computer drafting and modeling, CAD software has gone from a tool for turning designs into plans to a tool for producing the designs themselves. The increasingly popular technique of parametric design, which uses algorithms to establish formal relationships among different design elements, puts the computer’s calculative power at the center of the creative process. Using spreadsheet-like forms or software scripts, an architect-programmer plugs a series of mathematical rules, or parameters, into a computer—a ratio of window size to floor area, say, or the vectors of a curved surface—and lets the machine output the design. In the most aggressive application of the technique, a building’s form can be generated automatically by a set of algorithms rather than composed manually by the designer’s hand.
As is often the case with new design techniques, parametric design has spawned a novel style of architecture called parametricism. Inspired by the geometric complexities of digital animation and the frenetic, aseptic collectivism of social networks, parametricism rejects the orderliness of classical architecture in favor of free-flowing assemblages of baroque, futuristic shapes. Some traditionalists view parametricism as a distasteful fad, dismissing its productions as, to quote New York architect Dino Marcantonio, “little more than the blobs that one can produce with minimal effort on the computer.”32 In a more temperate critique published in The New Yorker, the architecture writer Paul Goldberger observed that while the “swoops and bends and twists” of digital designs can be alluring, they “often seem disconnected from anything other than their own, computer-generated reality.”33 But some younger architects see parametricism, together with other forms of “computational design,” as the defining architectural movement of our time, the center of energy in the profession. At the 2008 Architecture Biennale in Venice, Patrik Schumacher, a director of the influential Zaha Hadid firm in London, issued a “Parametricism Manifesto” in which he proclaimed that “parametricism is the great new style after modernism.” Thanks to computers, he said, the structures of the built world will soon be composed of “radiating waves, laminal flows, and spiraling eddies,” resembling “liquids in motion,” and “swarms of buildings” will “drift across the landscape” in concert with “dynamic swarms of human bodies.”34<
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Whether or not those harmonic swarms materialize, the controversy over parametric design brings into the open the soul searching that has been going on in architecture ever since CAD’s arrival. From the start, the rush to adopt design software has been shadowed with doubt and trepidation. Many of the world’s most respected architects and architecture teachers have warned that an overreliance on computers can narrow designers’ perspectives and degrade their talent and creativity. Renzo Piano, for one, grants that computers have become “essential” to the practice of architecture, but he also fears that designers are shifting too much of their work to software. While automation allows an architect to generate precise and seemingly accomplished 3-D designs quickly, the very speed and exactitude of the machine may cut short the messy and painstaking process of exploration that gives rise to the most inspired and meaningful designs. The allure of the work as it appears on the screen may be an illusion. “You know,” Piano says, “computers are getting so clever that they seem a bit like those pianos where you push a button and it plays the cha-cha and then a rumba. You may play very badly, but you feel like a great pianist. The same is true now in architecture. You may find yourself in the position where you feel like you’re pushing buttons and able to build everything. But architecture is about thinking. It’s about slowness in some way. You need time. The bad thing about computers is that they make everything run very fast.”35 The architect and critic Witold Rybczynski makes a similar point. While praising the great technological leaps that have transformed his profession over the years, he argues that “the fierce productivity of the computer carries a price—more time at the keyboard, less time thinking.”36
ARCHITECTS HAVE always thought of themselves as artists, and before the coming of CAD the wellspring of their art was the drawing. A freehand sketch is similar to a computer rendering in that it serves an obvious communication function. It provides an architect with a compelling visual medium for sharing a design idea with a client or a colleague. But the act of drawing is not just a way of expressing thought; it’s a way of thinking. “I haven’t got an imagination that can tell me what I’ve got without drawing it,” says the modernist architect Richard MacCormac. “I use drawing as a process of criticism and discovery.”37 Sketching provides a bodily conduit between the abstract and the tangible. “Drawings are not just end products: they are part of the thought process of architectural design,” explains Michael Graves, the celebrated architect and product designer. “Drawings express the interaction of our minds, eyes and hands.”38 The philosopher Donald Schön may have put it best when he wrote that an architect holds a “reflective conversation” with his drawings, a conversation that is also, through its physicality, a dialogue with the actual materials of construction.39 Through the back-and-forth, the give-and-take between hand and eye and mind, an idea takes form, a creative spark begins its slow migration from the imagination into the world.
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us Page 14