observation, reframing, cross-pollination, patterns

A friend in college once told me our campus architecture was originally designed for a college in Arizona, with a form meant to cool by retaining and amplifying wind.

As I walked through our campus one cold and windy day, I thought: why was this slight detail overlooked when deciding to use the design at our campus instead? Even more interesting, how does it work?

I tried envisioning how the buildings affect air and wind flow, as an engineer might. It felt as if a sheet of tracing paper was laid over what I was seeing, like a sleek aerospace diagram with arrows everywhere. Then I continued: what would another specialist say? I rolled through a series of disciplines and types, thinking what each would likely see, and then I had an epiphany, terribly obvious in hindsight:

• Many of the specialists would notice shared characteristics.
• Each would have their own interpretation of these though, based on different contexts and personal experience.
• It gets interesting when analyzing what overlaps and what does not, and why.

It was one of the first times I remember thinking critically of cross pollination among disciplines. I didn't think much of it at the time, just simply took note of it.