I’m of the first generation that grew up with computers. This doesn’t mean that I was born with an innate ability to use them, but being around something fosters a sense of acceptance and curiosity towards that thing. To see what I mean, give a two year old an iPhone and see how quickly she manages to unlock it and then delete all your apps. At first her actions are accidental, but eventually she recognizes a pattern of cause and effect. I grew up learning how to learn software.  My father had a range of CAD software installed on our home computer and I constantly played around with these tools for no reason other than my own amusement. Ashlar Vellum (the 80s version) was my prepubescent gateway drug to digital design and the computer simply became part of how I experience the world.

During a final review in graduate school, a well-known ‘environmentally-responsible’ architect told me that my project would suffer from inadequate daylight levels due to the strategy I had employed. This came as a surprise to me because the ‘problematic’ spaces were rather small with large amounts of north facing glass, but I assumed that the critic must’ve been right, given his collection of completed projects and, after all, I was just a grad student whose projects were small enough to fit in a jump drive. I later studied the project in a lighting simulation course and found that the ‘problematic’ spaces received plenty of daylight and, if anything, they were better than the ‘unproblematic’ spaces because of the more evenly distributed northern light.

The point isn’t that the critic was wrong, though he likely was, but rather that the success of a design is based upon decisions made in response to collections of information. In some cases, we don’t have all the necessary information or we don’t fully understand the inherent relationships so we fill in the blanks by throwing darts with our intuition. As I start my career in architecture, I’m left wondering what influences the accuracy of my intuition: is it possible for me to develop it faster with better accuracy, and broader relevance?

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