Liz Voeller - Infraculture

Co-living with friends, Part 1: Co-buying

Hello, Thank you for taking the time to consider our offer. We are four very good friends who want to make 123 Street our home, where we can start and raise our families together in a dynamic, nurturing, and intentional community. […] More than anything, the past year has truly emphasized

Inventory

An Inventory of Interests (2021)

Introduction Earlier this year I made a visit to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley to check out the archives of urban planner and futurist R L Meier. His personal note to himself, An Inventory of Interests, caught my attention for a) its candor in reflecting on his own intellectual

Ways of Thinking

My 2021 reading list

This year, I almost exclusively read science fiction. That's not normal for me, my go-to is non-fiction... but I've realized that there's a lot to be gained in the speculation of possibility. As Cixin Liu says in an introduction to his short stories: In China, the new generation’s way

Honeybees

Notes on the Eusocial Nature of Bees

I came across this paper while looking for descriptions of hierarchical organization within honeybee hives. The following includes comprehensive notes and thoughts from the paper "Revising the Superorganism" by Canciani et al (2019). Notes on: Revising the Superorganism: An Organizational Approach to Complex Eusociality Eusociality as example of social integration;

Cybernetics

Inspiration Wallets

I’ve been trying to think of ways to incentivize more people to highlight the works, individuals, and teams that inspire them. I think that this a) creates a fun story of provenance (kind of how Wikipedia does for scientists; see below for Darwin), but also b) serves as a

Air Quality

Bedtime CO2 during wildfires & air pollution

Late summer in California increasingly implies preparing for wildfire smoke. By “preparing” I mean focusing on indoor air quality, and in particular: Particulate Matter 2.5. We’re instructed to seal off our windows and doors from the outside and– if able– convert our bedrooms into clean rooms. The number

Speculative Fiction

Exploring Liu Cixin’s science fiction writing

I’ve been trying to better understand Liu Cixin’s writing style in hopes of improving my own. (That is, his Chinese writing translated into English.) One story caught my attention on a recent Sunday afternoon, as I rummaged around my house pretending to clean while daydreaming about dinosaur technocrats.

Complexity

The power of focused attention

Last month I was lucky to spend several weeks luxuriating in complexity science. Hosted by the Santa Fe Institute, the Complexity Interactive program is a virtual, part-time course focused on complex systems— equal parts lecture, discussion, group project, and mental orgy. Attendance was a gift to myself after many years

Organizations

Working Backwards: Separable, Single Threaded Teams and Herbert Simon

Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr describes in detail the inner workings of Amazon, including the development of its best practices over a nearly 3-decade history. The chapter Organizing: Separable, Single-Threaded Leadership quickly jumped out at me. Separable teams? Where had I heard that idea before? It didn’

Maintenance

Maintenance is palpable

We moved into an “old” house this month. Built over 80 years ago, you can sense the builder’s personality in the place. Mr. B… a bridge builder with hidden desires of becoming an architect. It shows. The beams are magnificent. Our structures, spectacular. And yet, the design seems amalgam.

Ways of Thinking

An ode to cavernous spaces

Do not feel small when you enter a cavernous space. For you have just set foot into an enormous catchment basin. Be glad for the space, for the volume. But with limits. The bounds keep your ideas from escaping. When I sit in an expansive space, the molecules of my

Climate

Why focus on concrete & cement

This post is cross-posted on the Build Incentive newsletter, a new project of mine. Why focus on embodied emissions?When I surveyed the landscape of Embodied, Operational, and End-of-Life emissions in the built environment last fall, it was clear that Operational was the cool kid at the party. In the

Honeybees

From comfort to constraint

We moved our bees this spring. From the grid of an urban environment close to the freeway to a meandering hillside close to the forest. The bees were ecstatic. Almost too happy. And so two weeks into moving, they swarmed. A sign of comfort, hives will split when they feel

Learning

Willing to Learn

Earlier this 2021, Mary Catherine Bateson passed away while surrounded by her family. I never had the chance to meet Mary Catherine, MCB in my personal notes, but I had wanted to. To make a trip out to the east coast to just chat. To learn about her chapters of

HVAC

My moonshot idea

What’s YOUR moonshot idea? Here’s one of mine– Decentralized Autonomous HVAC Next steps for clean indoor air & new kinds of building infrastructure

Complexity

Text notes: Architecture of Complexity

“In this paper I should like to report on some things we have been learning about particular kinds of complex systems encountered in the behavioral sciences.” An outline of Herbert Simon’s 1962 essay, “The Architecture of Complexity“ INTRODUCTIONObjective: Describe the usefulness of complex systems across fields. By being abstract,

Complexity

The Arch. of Complexity, the points that resonate

Herbert Simon’s The Architecture of Complexity is the text I keep returning to when reflecting backwards and forwards. For a concise summary of that essay, check out these Text Notes. For a brief snapshot of how one applies these ideas to one’s own thinking and learning (a la

Climate

Climate change: a problem of organized complexity

Problems of organized complexity The case for a simple pattern Concluding her famous ode to cities in 1961, Jane Jacobs writes, “Cities happen to be problems of organized complexity.” From sidewalks of access to sidewalks of place, cities deal “simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into

HVAC

HVAC systems… what are they?

A short explainer on HVAC. HVAC stands for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. When we say “HVAC” we most often mean the TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEMS that deliver heating, ventilation, and air conditioning in a building. Most commonly, a single HVAC system delivers all three of these functions (although decoupled systems are

Public Health

What can a Building Technologist do about Public Health? [Pre-Print]

Pre-Print? This is still a work in progress; I will continue to update this post over the coming weeks This piece explores why re-orienting buildings around public health is so important, and it offers areas of opportunity (particularly for indoor air quality via HVAC) for anyone– not just building technologists!

Buildings

What can a building technologist do about climate change? Part 3

WELCOME BACKIf you’ve stuck with me this long, thank you! You must be just as much of a buildings / climate change geek as I am. Earlier, I wrote about about the need to address building related greenhouse gas emissions and discussed the frictions that I believe prevent residents from

Buildings

What can a building technologist do about climate change? Part 2

Core & ShellIn an earlier post, I wondered: How does one determine what to spend one’s time on, in a shift to focusing on climate change? Particularly one who has an obsessive interest in people’s experiences with buildings and the built environment, like myself? I narrowed in on

Maintenance

Herb Simon on maintenance

Stewart Brand asks a great question: Did Herbert Simon explore the maintenance of systems? I haven’t found Simon discuss maintenance explicitly. But two related themes are worth highlighting: (1) Simon discusses maintenance through the topic of homeostasis. “For example, Maintenance of a system becomes much simpler if the internal

Maintenance

A short description of maintenance

My understanding of maintenance:More: capable to continue to evolveLess: contain at status quo / steady stateRelated to infrastructure:Keep flexible so can accommodate future changesAnd don’t forget the personal maintenance it takes to pursue unique ideas or to have sufficient “slack” to emotionally support others The Cybernetics of MaintenanceCybernetics

Infrastructure

Plans for an infrastructure conference

A listening dialogue on infrastructureLike any good art project, this idea has been percolating in my mind for a while now. A side project related but very different from my day-to-day. I propose hosting a day-long listening dialogue on the role of infrastructure across disciplines. This gathering would bring together