Overcoming Architectural Limitations With New Technology

The February issue of Technology Review has an interesting note by William J. Mitchell on architecture, entitled "Build from Scratch." Innovation in architecture is really possible! What we presently live in and with are building and environmental designs that with resemble hideous ideological concoctions of the worse art forms.

As Mitchell correctly writes architecture is not determined by technology, but the architect can use technology to reflect received ideology. Do we want an archtectural nightmare going on about us. Who chooses the designs for buildings, their location and their fitness for a location? Do the builders even think about anything other than making a short term profit?

I have strong preferences for how we could be creating community environments. This is not to say that I do not like the architecture that I see going up around me, but I really wonder how much time is spent in design and in consideration of wider comfort issues. What I think we need is design that helps us live longer and healthier. I am disappointed with design that adds stress and shocks the system.

We have all heard of cultural shock. Many of us get used to a specific architectural and environmental design and find it difficult to live with anything new. In my ideal world, the edges would be softer and kinder to the eyes. My world would be like a cinetographers ideal world in which I would be transported in my mind to peaceful things. Perhaps the reason that we have so much violence in our world is because we do not love it as it is.

We hate the architecture that we see around us and we want to destroy it and everything that reminds us of it. Had we the love for our world and could we change it into something closer to our dreams, we would perhaps be less likely to want to destroy it. An example would be the presence of flowing water, comfortable banks alongside streams that can be waded in, where pets can wander and places where children can play safely. Can we not design technology for our urban areas that helps us achieve such environments, or are they unrealizable dreams?

Modelling the Diffusion of Technology by TNCs

It has been some time since I even thought about work on technology diffusion and competitive responses of firms moving plant and research from the US to the UK that I undertook in the early 1970s.

Some of this has been published and republished and is available for download on the internet.

One of my articles is available as part of a Google book published through the UN Center for the study of activities of transnational corporations, see diffusion of technology or technology. My articles on inward investment to the UK by US companies in the semiconductor and in the pharmaceutical industries is available on the National Bureau of Economic Research NBER site.

I think this type of research is still state-of-the-art encorporating as it does a way to examine competition using a non-linear model of diffusion. The model combines two types of simple averages, those of position and rate of change, with data on number of expected entrants, their size, previous innovational/copy cat history and other characteristics.