Reflections, Part II
It looks like I am going to try to make this a daily thing. Well, let’s see how long this keeps up then.
Before I begin delving into the actual architectural education, there are other places to touch on first. I mentioned the Mojos, which were one very big part of my life. Now I’ll move on in the opposite direction. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I held a job throughout the entirety of my college life at IT Services in Iowa State. This too was and is a major influence on my life. However, unlike the Mojos, this part has been harder to make fit into my ideals, goals, etc. whatever you want to call them. This is because my time with IT Services gave me a lot of skills that people see at face value, and as such, has caused me both problems and opportunities.
I joined ITS in my first semester out of necessity. After a month of being on my own, I realized I needed extra money. My parents were paying for my tuition on housing. but as for everything else, I needed to find an extra source of income. At the time, I didn’t consider myself a computer whiz. I knew how to use a computer like anyone else could, but I didn’t think I would be able to manage a job in ITS. But they hired me, and I had gained a steady paycheck.
For the rest of my time at college, I gave a good portion of my soul to the Solution Center, and in the end, I like to think it was worth it. I learned alot in my time there, mainly from having to manage a knowledgebase of answers for two years (essentially having to keep up on at least a few thousand questions and making sure the answers are ready and right). I went from knowing almost nothing about troubleshooting to being able to diagnose and solve most problems within twenty minutes. I can work in Windows, Apple and Linux. I also now know quite a bit about networking and security. Plus, I have alot of people from MIS and SoftE and CompE who considered me a valued team member.
For those who have never worked in a support center before, it is not a super rewarding job. A majority of time, as with any service based job, is spent being yelled at by angry customers who blame you for their problems, and it can get under your skin pretty quick if you’re not careful. But this is something else, probably the most important thing, that the Solution Center taught me. Customer Service skills are invaluable. Learning how to empathetically connect to people on the fly allows me to comprehend the psychological standpoint behind issues. As such, when an angry caller comes in, I can calm them down, or at the very least, not take their comments personally.
However, and angry customer is not the hardest thing to work through. When word gets out that someone knows how to fix a computer, its amazing how quickly people want to be your friends. I don’t hold it against the people who used their acquaintance with me to get some free computer repair. Lord knows that people like GeekSquad are charging and arm and a leg for simple computer repair that should only take an hour and not three days. Also, when your computer goes haywire at midnight, you look for the quickest answer, and in a lot of cases, I was the quickest answer. I helped those I could, and if that meant some superficial friendships, well, it could be worse.
For it all thought, IT Services has a large influence on my design outlook. We live in the information age, and architecture needs to allow itself to exist in the same place. Since I started my education, I have felt the resistance. Architects fear the computer taking away their creativity. The computer is seemingly limiting because of the interface and the abilities of any program. I want to state that nothing will ever be comparable to the architect’s hand in the initial phases of a project. It’s how we think. But there is no reason to be afraid of the advancements that the computer will bring if we just allow it. By moving towards fully efficient building information models, we can ensure buildings that are safer and truly more energy efficient. The qualitative aspect comes from the mind of the architect, their eyes, their hands, but the quantitative, the efficiency, the safety, all of the numbers that we have simply guessed at and estimated in the past can be put into hard numbers, and the relationship between qualitative and quantitative in the built form could truly be explored. It’s exciting, but we have to be willingly to make technology work for us, not allow it to limit us just because a program can’t do what we want.
As we move forward, we are going to see information management follow hand in hand with the creative aspect of design. I really feel that if, as architects, we can get it together, we could be looking at a new age of fantastic and unprecedented design.
More to come.
