AAI Awards: Twenty Years
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Quick scribble about Symposium – 20 Years of AAI Awards Reviewed
http://www.irish-architecture.com/aai/events/data/1127790963.html
Brian O’ Hanlon.
20.10.05
The nature of certain individuals is to try and hold onto the past. The nature of others, is to go through life and retain very little. If the AAI was an individual person, that person would enjoy collecting artefacts, snippets and fragments. An attempt to capture lost time and lost places. One could debate the usefulness of such an exercise. I guess it depends on your point of view and natural inclination. Kenneth Frampton is a person who has collected many fragments down through the years. Frampton travelled the world, experienced many cultures and observed many trends. A lot of people find Frampton’s books on the history of architecture invaluable in trying to re-create times past in their minds.
A book written by David Kushner, called ‘Masters of Doom’ is about two young computer programmers, John Romero and John Carmack. Together they founded a company called Id Software in Houston, Texas and started a revolution in computing gaming. The book is about the lives of the two young men. Together, Carmack and Romero brought the genre of the ‘first person shooter’ into a whole new era and inspired generations that came afterwards. The book manages well to compare the personalities of Carmack and Romero. Carmack was the technical genius of the pair, but was never as concerned with riches or fame as Romero. Romero would write the stories and design the game play aspects, but Carmack would make it work in actual computer programming language. Carmack was fascinated by anything to do with engineering or design. Having bought a new Ferrari once, a rare financial splash for Carmack, his automatic impulse was to try and make the Ferrari go faster! Carmack would work tirelessly at a software gaming technology, until it reached perfection. John Romero, on the other hand, enjoyed the lifestyle of a rich young entrepeneur and liked to surround himself with his fans, his nice things, and all the trappings, the memories and the nostalgia.
Unfortunately, having reached their early success the partnership soured and the men went their separate ways. John Carmack was satisfied for most of his life with simplicity. He didn’t bother even to have a bed in some of his dwelling places. Carmack grew up used to poverty and got used to it. A mattress on the bedroom floor and some books to read was all that Carmack ever needed. Romero grew up in a similar poverty but craved the thrill and excitment of riches and fame. In architecture in Ireland, I think you have a similar situation. Two opposites sides of the same coin.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
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what about the fancy new flash site over here:
http://www.irish-architecture.com/aai/
I guess I was never a flash kind of guy, since most sites I tend to like are very plain indeed. But I guess, one has to hand it to the AAI this time, nice effort, looks quite nice. One complaint though, when you click on an event, and then go ‘back’, it takes you to the top of the list all over again and boy does this get to be annoying. Maybe this message might find its way back to the AAI, and they can take a look at how this works. Gee, I wonder if the AAI should invest some effort in making feed-back loops. Most vibrant online communities I have known, when you do a new web site, the feed back is almost instant, and form a debating point, all by itself for at least a week. Any thoughts?
Brian O’ Hanlon.
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Hey! I just spoke too soon.
That is a bit of a pain – you can’t mail someone a link to an event anymore either, my link above to the AAI 20 years symposium night, which worked last Friday night, is broken now. Oh, lets drag out the web meister and… 🙂 Seriously, I mean architects are supposed to at least consider the user dimension in these things, no? This is what I mean about Flash. HTML was boring and such, it was a dinner jacket and tie affair by any manner or means, but one of the things Tim Berners Lee was all about, was easy linking and coordination of data and information. It is great having a make over, but not at the expense of functionality please!
Brian O’ Hanlon.
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OMG, whoever designed that site, doesn’t no squat about web space.
Calendar view is gone, so now the new site design actually increases the likelihood of anyone getting the date, month, and even year completely wrong for any event! Furthermore, as a means of reminding oneself, when browsing through the AAI’s web site, now even the copy and paste text feature is totally unavailable, so forget about those last minute reminders via email to friends and oneself – you have to wait for this flash business to load up, and hope you manage to navigate correctly. It is only ‘hit and miss’ you don’t scroll past the next event and miss it completely – on a page assumed to keep one informed of upcoming events. I hope who ever designed and planned this web site, doesn’t sell their services too often designing buildings for clients. This is what I mean about aesthetics – if this were a house, I would probably like it for the first 5 minutes and curse the designer for the rest of my life. Whatever functionality there was in the old site – and it was enough – has been washed down the toilet for the sake of a flash gimick. Nice one AAI.
Final word, face it AAI, if you cannot manage this kind of endeavour properly, don’t even try. Stick to basics, and get back to basics. And above all, please get into to mindset of feedback – whenever you go doing a new website, you can’t just ‘throw something up’ overnight,… when you launch a new web space like this, after building it and launching it, you need at least a month or more of constant feedback from users, actually using the web space, to improve the product and make it function in some manner acceptable to those users. What the AAI has now for their website is a complete spagetti mess, it is almost impossible to navigate through. I only barely managed after a couple of goes, to actually find out when the next event was on, and I am still not sure given that fancy 10/11, or 11/10, minimalist descriptions of the date – yeah, may look cool, but functionality wise – s****.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
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