Our damned wandering eyes

As we all know, there is at least one self-help book out there extolling the virtues of performing repetitious tasks to enhance creativity. Right. But I'm about as big a believer in creativity (as a buzzword) as I am in productivity. So I won't write that essay (It would probably also qualify as a repetitious task because it's already been written so many times!). I won't go on about how nice it is to do the dishes.

What I will do, however, is tell you that performing repetitive tasks on what you are actually working on is perhaps the best way to make it better.

I'm an architect. Designing architecture is an iterative process, and much of what I do is changing things. Sometimes I change a lot of things so they fit a new idea or shifting conditions. I also correct things I did wrong yesterday. Embarrassingly often in the same places as I corrected them the day before that. Sometimes my task is to rebuild something in a better way, technically, so it will be easier to work with in the future. You clean up and restructure what you already got, without actually adding new properties or features. In programming, this is called "refactoring", but in architecture we just call it "boring". I promise I won't say boring is good. It isn't.

But familiarity is.

Repetition begets exposure, exposure breeds familiarity. Familiarity helps you get future decisions right. It also means you keep your eyes on the project, even parts you've already "finished". And this is great because our damned wandering eyes and minds will spot things you are not even looking for.

Back in the day, we used to have huge teams of architects and drafters working together on a project. Changing something? Well, maybe you had hundreds of drawings to redo by hand. It was tedious work, and we should be very glad we are past that now. But it had a silver lining. Every single line was drawn by someone actually looking at the drawing the moment it was produced. Laying a hand on the paper, seeing what surrounded the change. With the aid of computers, this changed. Types, families, blocks, copy-paste. It makes us work much faster, but it also means we don't always see how well the piece we just put in works in every place it ends up. Which is fine. We save so much time that we have more time to go through and review the results, right? Well, no. Because if we can do things faster, we always get fewer resources to do said thing. The team of architects and drafters is reduced in size, and less human time is spent staring for hours on the thing that is worked on. You get seconds here and seconds there. Creating becomes more of a blur.

Yet we continue to see the creating part as our calling, and fixing as something to automate. I'm not so sure. Because the better the computer gets at the boring stuff, the less reason we have to go over our project, again and again. Change the height of a line on every facade? Maybe you will spot a window that you just feel should be moved a bit as well. Plopping out annotation for every single wardrobe in every single apartment, couldn't the computer do that for me? Well. Such plugins and automations exist. But they might not, by just spending time hovering over the plan, notice that a door right next to the wardrobe wasn't fully accessible. And even if the automated function could do that, it wouldn't just pause for a second, think about what to get for dinner, return to the drawing with fresh eyes and go "But wait, what if I do this instead?" and redesign the whole layout.

The common conception is that if we get more automation to do the tedious stuff, the housekeeping, the tiny nudges and corrections, we can do more of the fun stuff. The broad strokes. What people outside our trade see as designing. But I think often the opposite is true. The real designing starts when we don't have a blank canvas anymore, and we need to start adapting.

Picking up what we've created, turning slowly around – in our hands or on our screens – looking for imperfections, is the job. One fix will lead to something else needing to be fixed, but often you won't spot that until you next circle back to it. And it's almost impossible to force oneself to have yet another look through the nooks and crannies of what we've built without having a mission to go there. Like annotating wardrobes.

That's why doing the boring things ends up being quite hard. Not because it's boring, but because you find so many fun things on the way.