I had an interesting piece come across my social media feed this week, it was called If the door’s locked, try the wall. The short piece on Tumblr is a reflection on Geoff Manaugh’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City, a book about jewelry thief Bill Mason.
I found the piece very relatable – especially the idea that our creativity is limited by adhering to known, familiar systems. He says:
Mason actually mocks the idea that a person would remain reliant on doors, making fun of anyone who thinks burglars, in particular, would respect the limitations of architecture. “Surely if someone were to rob the place,” he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, “they’d come in as respectable people would, through the door provided for the purpose. … Those people are mere slaves to architecture, spatial captives in a world someone else has designed for them.
By being so embedded in technology delivery, I have often felt it is a risk to our creativity to be so constrained by the systems in which we’re embedded. How / where in our work might it make sense to use a drywall knife, instead of the front door?
To use architect Rem Koolhaas’s phrase, we have been voluntary prisoners of architecture all along, willingly coerced and browbeaten by its code of spatial conduct, accepting walls as walls and going only where the corridors lead us.
This to me is one of the biggest risks of design being intertwined with tech. In the interest of speed and business outcomes, we design within the limits of the technologies at our disposal. But at what point are we curbing our own imaginations as well?
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