How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

by Stewart Brand

Shun designing tightly around anticipated technology. As energy analyst John Holdren says to all futurists, “We overestimate technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.” So design loose and generic around high tech. You will be wrong about what is coming, and whatever does come will soon change anyway. Playing out in imagination the potential consequences of even minor-seeming details is worth doing. (“We could put a tall window with a low sill here so it can be changed easily to a door later when we add the deck. But what if the deck turns out to be a porch and it winds up somewhere else because of a tree or something, and a drunk guest walks through the tall window one wintry night?”) Scenario-makers love imagining disasters. They are right to do so.