A common point between all the texts that was not discussed on our weekly debate was the fact that all of the Authors (by Authors i do not necessary refer to the text Authors, but in some cases to the people on whose work those texts are based on) where innovators of their filed of recherche. Sure all of them started their work based on the knowledge gathered from previous individuals, but their work in the end of the day did change the perspective of the following generations. It is a well known fact that A. Durer was not the first man to work with perspective and transformation. Long before him the Greeks where familiar with optical illusions, and (as far as I can remember) a century before him Filippo Brunelleschi was the person who defined the perspective. However Durer`s work with transformation was a game-changer in the filed. The same can be applied to Deborah Gordon studies over ant colonies and behavior. Her analysis enabled Steven Johnson to compare the (at first look unexisting) similarities between the ant colony and the human megalopolis. A point of view that to be honest bewildered me personally. I`ve never thought about (the big picture, the big picture) the fact that our conscious decisions combined all together and mixed with the timetable of generations have more to do with the shape of our cities, way more than any number of city developers, urbanists or architects can ever dream to. All of this applies amplified to Nicholas Negroponte. His work is fascinating, but pails compared with the accuracy of his predictions about software development. If he had wrote a novel he would probably be our modern Jules Verne. It is true that not all of his predictions are realized… …yet. There is no parent/child system or rewarding mechanism in our software today. However i still think his work back than was brilliant having in mind that only DOS existed. If we try to think in perspective the way Negroponte did, his not yet implemented ideas could get very real in an instant. The example that i can visualize is : one important issue today for every architectural design are the restrictions and regulations that every country have. Like safety regulations, health regulations and etc. The law is the law and must be followed. But laws changes as do regulations. Now imagine software that knows all regulations, restrictions and laws for every country and city. Software that tells you while you are drawing on your CAD program that the staircase must be wider than the one what you just made. And show you the line on regulation specifying that topic. Now such software would need a connection with a mother unit ( another software ) that has all the knowledge about regulations and gets updated immediately when laws are changing. This mother software can update later on the child software when the update is needed. This example is not meager science fiction. Technology today could allow us to actually have this. Hopefully it will be reality soon enough. As far as a topic for a recherche inspired by those texts assigned to us in part 3, well I am still waiting for it to pay me a visit. 🙂       

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