Located in the digital culture category, this project develops on a trend of implementing personal knowledge management/ PKM systems. It builds from ideas of Mark Wigley’s Architecture of Content Management (2013) and concepts of Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain/ BASB (2019).
The attention economy today drives anxieties of either subscribing to a propriety PKM framework or configuring a custom one is to increase productivity and creativity over time with a goal to better utilise digital material consumed.
The question I probe is, what are the components required to assemble an architectural personal information/ knowledge management system that generates intelligence it can apply in practice?
My interests to investigate knowledge construction in architecture and urbanism began around 2008-’09 when I was involved in a publishing project called the Mumbai Readers, a compilation of writings on Mumbai Urbanism. The books lead to a study of the archive as a site to stage and theorise urbanism. The need to have public interfaces for discussion of urban theory requires assembling an open access city information archive. As an ad-hoc repository, it was online between 2012 to 2017.
It served two ends of informing the type of information that was available on Mumbai, its extended urban region, and the producers of this information. Possible imaginations of Mumbai and its urbanism derived as a result. Extended findings from the work apprised attitudes and biases of data usage.
In 2018 when I moved from Mumbai to Thiruvananthapuram to teach at a local architectural institution, the urgency of academia leads to create a digital architectural design research library. Material is gathered from found shadow and open access libraries.
With both the archive (now repository) and the library, I was able to bring together a compilation of curated content that was used by distinct communities of practice to develop their ideas from. In total there are around 250GB of content accumulated over the projects. For the purposes of this research, I develop the library part of my information archive which right now has around 5000 documents mostly pdfs of books in 45 different categories.
The making of the library has gone through various phases. It first began as an exercise to locate pdfs of contemporary architectural design books accessible online. It consolidated into a form in 2010. I always had some of these around me from early 2003, but it was evident that they were limited since the same documents kept coming up on search results everywhere.
To stash was the norm then. Have in possession select digital copies of documents was a requirement. Most of these archives over time either were deleted or got filed away. An agency to generate intelligence from digital holdings never made any mention.
Methods of making in architectural research projects emphasised collection, refection, and presentation as a system to work with. Therefore, every project went through a content gathering phase, this is then compiled based on the requirements of the task at hand and a remix presented. Raw materials used to build projects, i.e., collections get discarded when the project is done, and an archive contains only completed work. Learnings from a project completed are rarely presented or taken forward.
Content available in the early 2000s vs material online today is very distinct. The value of a private digital archive has significantly dropped as available information sets online have increased. With so much subject matter generated faster than the speed of thought it is essential to probe what are the other ways to deal with information deluge that a practice can capitalise on to further its interests?
Theories, in addition to the undergraduate curriculum that guides the present form of the documents access framework are Jane Rendell’s critical spatial practices (2003), Johanna Drucker’s knowledge diagrams (2014), Sir John Soane's collection practices (1837), and RIBA Plan of Work (2020). These concepts directed strategies to better deal with using the library as a tool for design research.
Rather than an information black hole or a static anti-library can a system be developed to make the library a constantly active space that aids in generating content for the practice? and that framework made available for others to build on?
From 4 in 2019 to 37 apps today in 2021 (pc alone), note-taking apps which position as tools for network thought are on the rise. This rise reflects increased digital consumption where content feeds are a norm instead of occasional posts.
If digital consumption has become a feed so should the production of ideas too, is the pitch sold by Tiago et al. Architectural practices transition project to project. Feeds is a project, and every design practice is now mandatorily contributing to this economy.
According to Wigley, architects do not deliver buildings, but the information required to produce buildings. To change our strategies of design production we need newer models of managing the information that we have in our content libraries. Alternate ways to generate intelligence and therefore our services.
The two most popular systems in vogue right now are Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten (circa 1950s) and Tiago Forte’s BASB. While the Luhmann slip-box is a model of network theory and body of written work, Forte’s Second Brain is a framework of archival and retrieval of ideas. Both were assembled in use case situations which is distinct from architectural design project workflows.
To provide a domain-specific tool the research tries to compile a reference list of information systems used both historically and contemporary implementations applied today. Looked at as a series of case studies the research will present a summary of strategies each of the systems tried to achieve. The analysis delivers a set of building blocks that are applied to plan personal or community information repositories. and better manage the information they have as libraries and archives.
a tentative project calendar is as follows _
November – compile a personal history of information gathered around architecture between 2000 till 2021. / essay
December – assemble a database of productivity (file and note-taking) systems and theories (~ 35 – 40). / listing
January, February – analysis of the generated list to derive planning components for a PKM/ PIM framework. / report + glossary
March – preliminary literature review of domain-specific knowledge graphs and strategies to implement a local model. / essay
April – publish as work as public access site as version alfa of the project as a list of implementable strategies. / GitHub repository
#note: I have incrementally worked on the project since December 2020 and is currently in progress. Updates on ideas are accessed on isaacmathew.substack.com as daily sentences. The work is also developed as a public project building on discussions with the note-taking communities on Roam Research, Obsidian, and logseq discord, twitter. Once files locally are sorted, research will progress onto a public link.
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