THE SMALL ISLAND OF IGLOOLIK, lying off the coast of the Melville Peninsula in the Nunavut territory of the Canadian North, is a bewildering place in the winter. The average temperature hovers around twenty degrees below zero. Thick sheets of sea ice cover the surrounding waters. The sun is absent. Despite the brutal conditions, Inuit hunters have for some four thousand years ventured out from their homes on the island and traversed miles of ice and tundra in search of caribou and other game. The hunters’ ability to navigate vast stretches of barren Arctic terrain, where landmarks are few, snow formations are in constant flux, and trails disappear overnight, has amazed voyagers and scientists ever since 1822, when the English explorer William Edward Parry noted in his journal the “astonishing precision” of his Inuit guide’s geographic knowledge.1 The Inuit’s extraordinary wayfinding skills are born not of technological prowess—they’ve eschewed maps, compasses, and other instruments—but of a profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, tides, and currents. The Inuit are masters of perception.
Or at least they used to be. Something changed in Inuit culture at the turn of the millennium. In the year 2000, the U.S. government lifted many of the restrictions on the civilian use of the global positioning system. The accuracy of GPS devices improved even as their prices dropped. The Igloolik hunters, who had already swapped their dogsleds for snowmobiles, began to rely on computer-generated maps and directions to get around. Younger Inuit were particularly eager to use the new technology. In the past, a young hunter had to endure a long and arduous apprenticeship with his elders, developing his wayfinding talents over many years. By purchasing a cheap GPS receiver, he could skip the training and offload responsibility for navigation to the device. And he could travel out in some conditions, such as dense fog, that used to make hunting trips impossible. The ease, convenience, and precision of automated navigation made the Inuit’s traditional techniques seem antiquated and cumbersome by comparison.
But as GPS devices proliferated on Igloolik, reports began to spread of serious accidents during hunts, some resulting in injuries and even deaths. The cause was often traced to an overreliance on satellites. When a receiver breaks or its batteries freeze, a hunter who hasn’t developed strong wayfinding skills can easily become lost in the featureless waste and fall victim to exposure. Even when the devices operate properly, they present hazards. The routes so meticulously plotted on satellite maps can give hunters a form of tunnel vision. Trusting the GPS instructions, they’ll speed onto dangerously thin ice, over cliffs, or into other environmental perils that a skilled navigator would have had the sense and foresight to avoid. Some of these problems may eventually be mitigated by improvements in navigational devices or by better instruction in their use. What won’t be mitigated is the loss of what one tribal elder describes as “the wisdom and knowledge of the Inuit.”2
The anthropologist Claudio Aporta, of Carleton University in Ottawa, has been studying Inuit hunters for years. He reports that while satellite navigation offers attractive advantages, its adoption has already brought a deterioration in wayfinding abilities and, more generally, a weakened feel for the land. As a hunter on a GPS-equipped snowmobile devotes his attention to the instructions coming from the computer, he loses sight of his surroundings. He travels “blindfolded,” as Aporta puts it.3 A singular talent that has defined and distinguished a people for thousands of years may well evaporate over the course of a generation or two.
THE WORLD is a strange, changeable, and dangerous place. Getting around in it demands of any animal a great deal of effort, mental and physical. For ages, human beings have been creating tools to reduce the strain of travel. History is, among other things, a record of the discovery of ingenious new ways to ease our passage through our environs, to make it possible to cross greater and more daunting distances without getting lost, roughed up, or eaten. Simple maps and trail markers came first, then star maps and nautical charts and terrestrial globes, then instruments like sounding weights, quadrants, astrolabes, compasses, octants and sextants, telescopes, hourglasses, and chronometers. Lighthouses were erected along shorelines, buoys set in coastal waters. Roads were paved, signs posted, highways linked and numbered. It has, for most of us, been a long time since we’ve had to rely on our wits to get around.
GPS receivers and other automated mapping and direction-plotting devices are the latest additions to our navigational toolkit. They also give the old story a new and worrisome twist. Earlier navigational aids, particularly those available and affordable to ordinary folks, were just that: aids. They were designed to give travelers a greater awareness of the world around them—to sharpen their sense of direction, provide them with advance warning of danger, highlight nearby landmarks and other points of orientation, and in general help them situate themselves in both familiar and alien settings. Satellite navigation systems can do all those things, and more, but they’re not designed to deepen our involvement with our surroundings. They’re designed to relieve us of the need for such involvement. By taking control of the mechanics of navigation and reducing our own role to following routine commands—turn left in five hundred yards, take the next exit, stay right, destination ahead—the systems, whether running through a dashboard, a smartphone, or a dedicated GPS receiver, end up isolating us from the environment. As a team of Cornell University researchers put it in a 2008 paper, “With the GPS you no longer need to know where you are and where your destination is, attend to physical landmarks along the way, or get assistance from other people in the car and outside of it.” The automation of wayfinding serves to “inhibit the process of experiencing the physical world by navigation through it.” 4
As is so often the case with gadgets and services that ease our way through life, we’ve celebrated the arrival of inexpensive GPS units. The New York Times writer David Brooks spoke for many when, in a 2007 op-ed titled “The Outsourced Brain,” he raved about the navigation system installed in his new car: “I quickly established a romantic attachment to my GPS. I found comfort in her tranquil and slightly Anglophilic voice. I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line.” His “GPS goddess” had “liberated” him from the age-old “drudgery” of navigation. And yet, he grudgingly confessed, the emancipation delivered by his in-dash muse came at a cost: “After a few weeks, it occurred to me that I could no longer get anywhere without her. Any trip slightly out of the ordinary had me typing the address into her system and then blissfully following her satellite-fed commands. I found that I was quickly shedding all vestiges of geographic knowledge.” The price of convenience was, Brooks wrote, a loss of “autonomy.”5 The goddess was also a siren.
We want to see computer maps as interactive, high-tech versions of paper maps, but that’s a mistaken assumption. It’s yet another manifestation of the substitution myth. Traditional maps give us context. They provide us with an overview of an area and require us to figure out our current location and then plan or visualize the best route to our next stop. Yes, they require some work—good tools always do—but the mental effort aids our mind in creating its own cognitive map of an area. Map reading, research has shown, strengthens our sense of place and hones our navigational skills—in ways that can make it easier for us to get around even when we don’t have a map at hand. We seem, without knowing it, to call on our subconscious memories of paper maps in orienting ourselves in a city or town and determining which way to head to arrive at our destination. In one revealing experiment, researchers found that people’s navigational sense is actually sharpest when they’re facing north—the same way maps point.6 Paper maps don’t just shepherd us from one place to the next; they teach us how to think about space.
The maps generated by satellite-linked computers are different. They usually provide meager spatial information and few navigational cues. Instead of requiring us to puzzle out where we are in an area, a GPS device simply sets us at the center of the map and then makes the world circulate around us. In this miniature parody of the pre-Copernican universe, we can get around without needing to know where we are, where we’ve been, or which direction we’re heading. We just need an address or an intersection, the name of a building or a shop, to cue the device’s calculations. Julia Frankenstein, a German cognitive psychologist who studies the mind’s navigational sense, believes it’s likely that “the more we rely on technology to find our way, the less we build up our cognitive maps.” Because computer navigation systems provide only “bare-bones route information, without the spatial context of the whole area,” she explains, our brains don’t receive the raw material required to form rich memories of places. “Developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes.”7
Other scientists agree. A British study found that drivers using paper maps developed stronger memories of routes and landmarks than did those relying on turn-by-turn instructions from satellite systems. After completing a trip, the map users were able to sketch more precise and detailed diagrams of their routes. The findings, reported the researchers, “provide strong evidence that the use of a vehicle navigation system will impact negatively on the formation of drivers’ cognitive maps.”8 A study of drivers conducted at the University of Utah found evidence of “inattentional blindness” in GPS users, which impaired their “wayfinding performance” and their ability to form visual memories of their surroundings.9 GPS-wielding pedestrians appear to suffer the same disabilities. In an experiment conducted in Japan, researchers had a group of people walk to a series of destinations in a city. Some of the subjects were given hand-held GPS devices; others used paper maps. The ones with the maps took more direct routes, had to pause less often, and formed clearer memories of where they’d been than did the ones with the gadgets. An earlier experiment, involving German pedestrians exploring a zoo, produced similar results.10
The artist and designer Sara Hendren, commenting on a trip she made to attend a conference in an unfamiliar city, summed up how easy it is to become dependent on computer maps today—and how such dependency can short-circuit the mind’s navigational faculties and impede the development of a sense of place. “I realized that I was using my phone’s map application, with spoken cues, to make the same short trip between my hotel and a conference center just five minutes away, several days in a row,” she recalled. “I was really just willfully turning off the sphere of perception that I’ve relied on heavily most of my life: I made no attempt to remember landmarks and relationships and the look or feel of roads and such.” She worries that by “outsourcing my multi-modal responsiveness and memory,” she is “impoverishing my overall sensory experience.”11
AS TALES of discombobulated pilots, truck drivers, and hunters demonstrate, a loss of navigational acumen can have dire consequences. Most of us, in our daily routines of driving and walking and otherwise getting around, are unlikely to find ourselves in such perilous spots. Which raises the obvious question: Who cares? As long as we arrive at our destination, does it really matter whether we maintain our navigational sense or offload it to a machine? An Inuit elder on Igloolik may have good reason to bemoan the adoption of GPS technology as a cultural tragedy, but those of us living in lands crisscrossed by well-marked roads and furnished with gas stations, motels, and 7-Elevens long ago lost both the custom of and the capacity for prodigious feats of wayfinding. Our ability to perceive and interpret topography, especially in its natural state, is already much reduced. Paring it away further, or dispensing with it altogether, doesn’t seem like such a big deal, particularly if in exchange we get an easier go of it.
But while we may no longer have much of a cultural stake in the conservation of our navigational prowess, we still have a personal stake in it. We are, after all, creatures of the earth. We’re not abstract dots proceeding along thin blue lines on computer screens. We’re real beings in real bodies in real places. Getting to know a place takes effort, but it ends in fulfillment and in knowledge. It provides a sense of personal accomplishment and autonomy, and it also provides a sense of belonging, a feeling of being at home in a place rather than passing through it. Whether practiced by a caribou hunter on an ice floe or a bargain hunter on an urban street, wayfinding opens a path from alienation to attachment. We may grimace when we hear people talk of “finding themselves,” but the figure of speech, however vain and shopworn, acknowledges our deeply held sense that who we are is tangled up in where we are. We can’t extract the self from its surroundings, at least not without leaving something important behind.
A GPS device, by allowing us to get from point A to point B with the least possible effort and nuisance, can make our lives easier, perhaps imbuing us, as David Brooks suggests, with a numb sort of bliss. But what it steals from us, when we turn to it too often, is the joy and satisfaction of apprehending the world around us—and of making that world a part of us. Tim Ingold, an anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, draws a distinction between two very different modes of travel: wayfaring and transport. Wayfaring, he explains, is “our most fundamental way of being in the world.” Immersed in the landscape, attuned to its textures and features, the wayfarer enjoys “an experience of movement in which action and perception are intimately coupled.” Wayfaring becomes “an ongoing process of growth and development, or self-renewal.” Transport, on the other hand, is “essentially destination-oriented.” It’s not so much a process of discovery “along a way of life” as a mere “carrying across, from location to location, of people and goods in such a way as to leave their basic natures unaffected.” In transport, the traveler doesn’t actually move in any meaningful way. “Rather, he is moved, becoming a passenger in his own body.”12
Wayfaring is messier and less efficient than transport, which is why it has become a target for automation. “If you have a mobile phone with Google Maps,” says Michael Jones, an executive in Google’s mapping division, “you can go anywhere on the planet and have confidence that we can give you directions to get to where you want to go safely and easily.” As a result, he declares, “No human ever has to feel lost again.”13 That certainly sounds appealing, as if some basic problem in our existence had been solved forever. And it fits the Silicon Valley obsession with using software to rid people’s lives of “friction.” But the more you think about it, the more you realize that to never confront the possibility of getting lost is to live in a state of perpetual dislocation. If you never have to worry about not knowing where you are, then you never have to know where you are. It is also to live in a state of dependency, a ward of your phone and its apps.
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 lives.
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
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.
Veteran architects’ intuitive sense of the centrality of sketching to creative thinking is supported by studies of drawing’s cognitive underpinnings and effects. Sketches on paper serve to expand the capacity of working memory, allowing an architect to keep in mind many different design options and variations. At the same time, the physical act of drawing, by demanding strong visual focus and deliberate muscle movements, aids in the forming of long-term memories. It helps the architect recall earlier sketches, and the ideas behind them, as he tries out new possibilities. “When I draw something, I remember it,” explains Graves. “The drawing is a reminder of the idea that caused me to record it in the first place.” 40 Drawing also allows the architect to shift quickly between different levels of detail and different degrees of abstraction, viewing a design from many angles simultaneously and weighing the implications of changes in details for the overall structure. Through drawing, writes the British design scholar Nigel Cross in his book Designerly Ways of Knowing, an architect not only progresses toward a final design but also hashes out the nature of the problem he’s trying to solve: “We have seen that sketches incorporate not only drawings of tentative solution concepts but also numbers, symbols and texts, as the designer relates what he knows of the design problem to what is emerging as a solution. Sketching enables exploration of the problem space and the solution space to proceed together.” In the hands of a talented architect, a sketchpad becomes, Cross concludes, “a kind of intelligence amplifier.” 41
Drawing might best be thought of as manual thinking. It is as much tactile as cerebral, as dependent on the hand as on the brain. The act of sketching appears to be a means of unlocking the mind’s hidden stores of tacit knowledge, a mysterious process crucial to any act of artistic creation and difficult if not impossible to accomplish through conscious deliberation alone. “Design knowledge is knowing in action,” Schön observed, and it “is mainly tacit.” Designers “can best (or only) gain access to their knowledge in action by putting themselves into the mode of doing.” 42 Designing with software on a computer screen is also a mode of doing, but it’s a different mode. It emphasizes the more formal side of the work—thinking logically through a building’s functional requirements and how various architectural elements might best be combined to achieve them. By diminishing the involvement of the hand, that “tool of tools,” as Aristotle called it, the computer circumscribes the physicality of the task and narrows the architect’s perceptual field. In place of the organic, corporeal figures that emerge from the tip of a pencil or a piece of charcoal, CAD software substitutes, Schön argued, “symbolic, procedural representations,” which “are bound to be incomplete or inadequate in relation to the actual phenomena of design.” 43 Just as the GPS screen deadens the Inuit hunter to the Arctic environment’s faint but profuse sensory signals, the CAD screen restricts the architect’s perception and appreciation of the materiality of his work. The world recedes.
In 2012, the Yale School of Architecture held a symposium called “Is Drawing Dead?” The stark title reflects a growing sense that the architect’s freehand sketch is being rendered obsolete by the computer. The transition from sketchpad to screen entails, many architects believe, a loss of creativity, of adventurousness. Thanks to the precision and apparent completeness of screen renderings, a designer working at a computer has a tendency to lock in, visually and cognitively, on a design at an early stage. He bypasses much of the reflective and exploratory playfulness that springs from the tentativeness and ambiguity of sketching. Researchers term this phenomenon “premature fixation” and trace its cause to “the disincentive for design changes once a large amount of detail and interconnectedness is built too quickly into a CAD model.” 44 The designer at the computer also tends to emphasize formal experimentation at the expense of expressiveness. By weakening an architect’s “personal, emotional connection with the work,” Michael Graves argues, CAD software produces designs that, “while complex and interesting in their own way,” often “lack the emotional content of a design derived from hand.” 45
The distinguished Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa makes a related point in his eloquent 2009 book The Thinking Hand. He argues that the growing reliance on computers is making it harder for designers to imagine the human qualities of their buildings—to inhabit their works in progress in the way that people will ultimately inhabit the finished structures. Whereas hand-drawn sketches and handmade models have “the same flesh of physical materiality that the material object being designed and the architect himself embody,” computer operations and images exist “in a mathematicised and abstracted immaterial world.” Pallasmaa believes that “the false precision and apparent finiteness of the computer image” can stunt an architect’s aesthetic sense, leading to technically stunning but emotionally sterile designs. In drawing with a pen or pencil, he writes, “the hand follows the outlines, shapes and patterns of the object,” but when manipulating a simulated image with software, “the hand usually selects the lines from a given set of symbols that have no analogical—or, consequently, haptic or emotional—relation to the object.” 46
The controversy over the use of computers in design professions will go on, and each side will offer compelling evidence and persuasive arguments. Design software, too, will continue to advance, in ways that may address some of the limitations of existing digital tools. But whatever the future brings, the experience of architects and other designers makes clear that the computer is never a neutral tool. It influences, for better or worse, the way a person works and thinks. A software program follows a particular routine, which makes certain ways of working easier and others harder, and the user of the program adapts to the routine. The character and the goals of the work, as well as the standards by which it is judged, are shaped by the machine’s capabilities. Whenever a designer or artisan (or anyone else, for that matter) becomes dependent on a program, she also assumes the preconceptions of the program’s maker. In time, she comes to value what the software can do and dismiss as unimportant or irrelevant or simply unimaginable what it cannot. If she doesn’t adapt, she risks being marginalized in her profession.
Beyond the specifications of the programming, simply transferring work from the world to the screen entails deep changes in perspective. Greater stress is placed on abstraction, less on materiality. Calculative power grows; sensory engagement fades. The precise and the explicit take precedence over the tentative and the ambiguous. E. J. Meade, a founder of Arch11, a small architecture firm in Boulder, Colorado, praises the efficiencies of design software, but he worries that popular programs like Revit and SketchUp are becoming too prescriptive. A designer need only type in the dimensions of a wall or floor or other surface, and with a click of a button the software generates all the details, automatically drawing each board or concrete block, each tile, all the supports, the insulation, the mortar, the texture of the plaster. Meade believes the way architects work and think is becoming homogenized as a result, and the buildings they design are becoming more predictable. “When you flipped through architecture journals in the 1980s,” he told me, “you saw the hand of the individual architect.” Today, what you tend to see is the functioning of the software: “You can read the operation of the technology in the final product.” 47
Like their counterparts in medicine, many veteran designers fear that the growing reliance on automated tools and routines is making it harder for students and younger professionals to learn the subtleties of their trade. Jacob Brillhart, an architecture professor at the University of Miami, believes that the easy shortcuts provided by programs like Revit are undermining “the apprenticeship process.” Relying on software to fill in design details and specify materials “only breeds more banal, lazy and uneventful designs that are void of intellect, imagination and emotion.” He also sees, again echoing the experience of doctors, a cut-and-paste culture emerging in his profession, with younger architects “pulling details, elevations, and wall sections off the office server from past projects and reassembling them.” 48 The connection between doing and knowing is breaking down.
The danger looming over the creative trades is that designers and artists, dazzled by the computer’s superhuman speed, precision, and efficiency, will eventually take it for granted that the automated way is the best way. They’ll agree to the trade-offs that software imposes without considering them. They’ll rush down the path of least resistance, even though a little resistance, a little friction, might have brought out the best in them.
“TO REALLY know shoelaces,” the political scientist and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford has observed, “you have to tie shoes.” That’s a simple illustration of a deep truth that Crawford explores in his 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft: “If thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it.” 49 Crawford draws on the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argued that the deepest form of understanding available to us “is not mere perceptual cognition, but, rather, a handling, using, and taking care of things, which has its own kind of ‘knowledge.’ ”50
We tend to talk about knowledge work as if it’s something different from and even incompatible with manual labor—I confess to having said as much in earlier sections of this book—but the distinction is a smug and largely frivolous one. All work is knowledge work. The carpenter’s mind is no less animated and engaged than the actuary’s. The architect’s accomplishments depend as much on the body and its senses as the hunter’s do. What is true of other animals is true of us: the mind is not sealed in the skull but extends throughout the body. We think not only with our brain but also with our eyes and ears, nose and mouth, limbs and torso. And when we use tools to extend our grasp, we think with them as well. “Thinking, or knowledge-getting, is far from being the armchair thing it is often supposed to be,” wrote the American philosopher and social reformer John Dewey in 1916. “Hands and feet, apparatus and appliances of all kinds are as much a part of it as changes in the brain.”51 To act is to think, and to think is to act.
Our desire to segregate the mind’s cogitations from the body’s exertions reflects the grip that Cartesian dualism still holds on us. When we think about thinking, we’re quick to locate our mind, and hence our self, in the gray matter inside our skull and to see the rest of the body as a mechanical life-support system that keeps the neural circuits charged. More than a fancy of philosophers like Descartes and his predecessor Plato, this dualistic view of mind and body as operating in isolation from each other appears to be a side effect of consciousness itself. Even though the bulk of the mind’s work goes on behind the scenes, in the shadows of the unconscious, we’re aware only of the small but brightly lit window that the conscious mind opens for us. And our conscious mind tells us, insistently, that it’s separate from the body.
According to UCLA psychology professor Matthew Lieberman, the illusion stems from the fact that when we contemplate our bodies, we draw on a different part of our brain than when we contemplate our minds. “When you think about your body and the actions of your body, you recruit a prefrontal and parietal region on the outer surface of your right hemisphere,” he explains. “When you think about your mind you instead recruit different prefrontal and parietal regions in the middle of the brain, where the two hemispheres touch each other.” When different areas in the brain process experiences, the conscious mind interprets those experiences as belonging to different categories. While the “hard-wired illusion” of mind-body dualism doesn’t reflect actual “distinctions in nature,” Lieberman emphasizes, it nevertheless has “immediate psychological reality for us.”52
The more we learn about ourselves, the more we realize how misleading that particular “reality” is. One of the most interesting and illuminating areas of study in contemporary psychology and neuroscience involves what’s called embodied cognition. Today’s scientists and scholars are confirming John Dewey’s insight of a century ago: Not only are brain and body composed of the same matter, but their workings are interwoven to a degree far beyond what we assume. The biological processes that constitute “thinking” emerge not just from neural computations in the skull but from the actions and sensory perceptions of the entire body. “For example,” explains Andy Clark, a philosopher of mind at the University of Edinburgh who has written widely on embodied cognition, “there’s good evidence that the physical gestures we make while we speak actually reduce the ongoing cognitive load on the brain, and that the biomechanics of the muscle and tendon systems of the legs hugely simplify the problem of controlled walking.”53 The retina, recent research shows, isn’t a passive sensor sending raw data to the brain, as was once assumed; it actively shapes what we see. The eye has smarts of its own.54 Even our conceptual musings appear to involve the body’s systems for sensing and moving. When we think abstractly or metaphorically about objects or phenomena in the world—tree branches, say, or gusts of wind—we mentally reenact, or simulate, our physical experience of the things.55 “For creatures like us,” Clark argues, “body, world, and action” are “co-architects of that elusive thing that we call the mind.”56
How cognitive functions are distributed among the brain, the sensory organs, and the rest of the body is still being studied and debated, and some of the more extravagant claims made by embodied-cognition advocates, such as the suggestion that the individual mind extends outside the body into the surrounding environment, remain controversial. What is clear is that we can no more separate our thinking from our physical being than we can separate our physical being from the world that spawned it. “Nothing about human experience remains untouched by human embodiment,” writes the philosopher Shaun Gallagher: “from the basic perceptual and emotional processes that are already at work in infancy, to a sophisticated interaction with other people; from the acquisition and creative use of language, to higher cognitive faculties involving judgment and metaphor; from the exercise of free will in intentional action, to the creation of cultural artifacts that provide for further human affordances.”57
The idea of embodied cognition helps explain, as Gallagher suggests, the human race’s prodigious facility for technology. Tuned to the surrounding environment, our bodies and brains are quick to bring tools and other artifacts into our thought processes—to treat things, neurologically, as parts of our selves. If you walk with a cane or work with a hammer or fight with a sword, your brain will incorporate the tool into its neuronal map of your body. The nervous system’s blending of body and object is not unique to humans. Monkeys use sticks to dig ants and termites from the ground, elephants use leafy branches to swat away biting flies, dolphins use bits of sponge to protect themselves from scrapes while digging for food on the ocean floor. But Homo sapiens’s superior aptitude for conscious reasoning and planning enables us to design ingenious tools and instruments for all sorts of purposes, extending our mental as well as our physical capacities. We have an ancient tendency toward what Clark terms “cognitive hybridization,” the mixing of the biological and the technological, the internal and the external.58
The ease with which we make technology part of our selves can also lead us astray. We can grant power to our tools in ways that may not be in our best interest. One of the great ironies of our time is that even as scientists discover more about the essential roles that physical action and sensory perception play in the development of our thoughts, memories, and skills, we’re spending less time acting in the world and more time living and working through the abstract medium of the computer screen. We’re disembodying ourselves, imposing sensory constraints on our existence. With the general-purpose computer, we’ve managed, perversely enough, to devise a tool that steals from us the bodily joy of working with tools.
Our belief, intuitive but erroneous, that our intellect operates in isolation from our body leads us to discount the importance of involving ourselves with the world of things. That in turn makes it easy to assume that a computer—which to all appearances is an artificial brain, a “thinking machine”—is a sufficient and indeed superior tool for performing the work of the mind. Google’s Michael Jones takes it as a given that “people are about 20 IQ points smarter now,” thanks to his company’s mapping tools and other online services.59 Tricked by our own brains, we assume that we sacrifice nothing, or at least nothing essential, by relying on software scripts to travel from place to place or to design buildings or to engage in other sorts of thoughtful and inventive work. Worse yet, we remain oblivious to the fact that there are alternatives. We ignore the ways that software programs and automated systems might be reconfigured so as not to weaken our grasp on the world but to strengthen it. For, as human-factors researchers and other experts on automation have found, there are ways to break the glass cage without losing the many benefits computers grant us.