Was able to get some time this week to catchup with Bryan Boyer.

We talked about some of the work he was doing with his students, particularly challenging them to think about design interventions and prototyping those across the ‘pace layers’ as famously depicted by Stewart Brand in his book “How buildings learn”

The image is totemic for design practitioners and theorists of a certain vintage (although I’m not sure how fully it resonates with today’s digital ‘product’ design / UX/UI generation) and certainly has been something I’ve wielded over the last two decades or so.

I think my first encounter with it would have been around 2002/2003 or so, in my time at Nokia.

I distinctly remember a conference where (perhaps unsurprisingly!) Dan Hill quoted it – I think it was DIS in Cambridge Massachusetts, where I also memorably got driven around one night in a home-brew dune buggy built and piloted (for want of a better term) by Saul Griffith.

For those not familiar with it – here it is. 

The ‘point’ is to show the different cadences of change and progress in different idealised strata of civilisation (perhaps a somewhat narrow WEIRD-ly defined civilisation) – and moreover, much like the slips, schisms and landslides of different geological layers – make the reader aware of the shearing forces and tensions between those layers.

It is a constant presence in the discourse which both leads to it’s dismissal / uncritical acceptance as a cliche. 

But this familiarity, aside from breeding contempt means it is also something quite fun to play in semi-critical ways.

While talking with Bryan, I discussed the biases perhaps embedded in showing ‘fashion’ as a wiggly ‘irrational’ line compared to the other layers. 

What thoughts may come from depicting all the layers as wiggly?

Another thought from our chat was to extend the geological metaphor to the layers.

Geologists and earth scientists often find the most interesting things at the interstices of the layers. Deposits or thin layers that tell a rich tale of the past. Tell-tale indicators of calamity suck as the K–Pg/K-T boundary. Annals of a former world.

The laminar boundary between infrastructure and institutions is perhaps the layer that gets the least examination in our current obsession with “product”…

I’ve often discussed with folks the many situations where infrastructure (capex) is mistaken for something that can replace institutions/labour (opex) – and where the role of service design interventions or strategic design prototypes can help mitigate.

In the pace layers, perhaps we can call that the “Dan Hill Interstitial Latencies Layer” – pleasingly recurrent in its acronymic form (D-HILL) and make it irregular and gnarly to indicate the difficulties there…

The Representational Planar OP-Ex layer (R-POPE) might be another good name, paying homage to the other person I associate with this territory, Richard Pope. I’ve just started reading Richard’s book “Platformland” which I’m sure will have a lot to say about it.

I just finished Deb Chachra’s excellent “How Infrastructure Works”, which while squarely examining the infrastructure pace layer points out the interfaces and interconnections with all the others.

“We might interact with them as individuals but they’re inherently collective, social, and spatial. Because they bring resources to where they’re used, they create enduring relationships not just between the people who share the network but also between those people and place, where they are in the world and the landscape the network traverses. These systems make manifest our ability to cooperate to meet universal needs and care for each other.”

So, perhaps… rather than superficial snark about a design talk cliche, the work of unpacking and making connective tissue across the pace layers might seem more vital in that context.