My father is an advanced Parkinson’s patient. His disease has slowly robbed him, first of his movement, then his speech, now partially his sight and even more critically, his ability to swallow or bring up the phlegm when he coughs. The last 15 years has been a parade of declining abilities – throughout which, his patented trademark smile and his extreme tolerance for pain have carried him through. Now in his mid eighties, he has good days, bad days and very bad days but that smile keeps shining through.
My father’s friends and younger associates from his days at the Indian Posts and Telegraphs have all gone to the big telephone exchange in the sky. He sometimes wonders why he is alive when they are all gone. A man of much reading and knowledge, his partially sightless eyes and his strength-less arms make reading impossible. Not to speak of the inability to perform all the repairs he used to make to the appliances in the house and the car in the garage.
We recently heard that an Indian entrepreneur who lives locally died in his early forties. My brother-in-law died in his sleep at 56. Everywhere, it seems, people seem to be calling it quits, checking out and ending their days on the planet due to some form of body failure. My recent eye diagnosis has squarely put me on the slow inexorable journey into old age.
So what does all this have to do with architecture? I think of human health as a maintenance problem. I test my blood on occasion for sugar levels, and its like pulling out the dipstick on my car to see if the oil is dirty.
And the architecture lesson of the day is: Is catastrophic collapse better than prolonged and increasing degradation of the senses? Or is there such a thing as graceful degradation that robs slowly but systematically?
Condition based maintenance (CBM) is a technique that has lately come into popularity. “The goal of CBM is to perform maintenance only upon evidence of need.” [Defense Acquisition University] The idea is that pulling vehicles into the depot for scheduled maintenance (especially when not required, to play safe) is not always a good one, when there is pressure to perform their mission and their presence is needed elsewhere. Instead, sensors on board are constantly screaming the health of the vehicle and predictive algorithms are used to determine impending failure.
Boy, I would like to order ten of those! Every enterprise needs predictive maintenance because both preventive and breakdown maintenance are so expensive. Predictive maintenance can only come with enterprise dashboards and smart algorithms as well as a lot of heuristics needed to tune the “predictions”.
In the meantime I am hoping that predictive maintenance for human beings is just around the corner and that one finger stick and dipstick reading of the blood is enough to warn me of all sorts of bad things coming at me, not just my sugar levels.
My father’s friends and younger associates from his days at the Indian Posts and Telegraphs have all gone to the big telephone exchange in the sky. He sometimes wonders why he is alive when they are all gone. A man of much reading and knowledge, his partially sightless eyes and his strength-less arms make reading impossible. Not to speak of the inability to perform all the repairs he used to make to the appliances in the house and the car in the garage.
We recently heard that an Indian entrepreneur who lives locally died in his early forties. My brother-in-law died in his sleep at 56. Everywhere, it seems, people seem to be calling it quits, checking out and ending their days on the planet due to some form of body failure. My recent eye diagnosis has squarely put me on the slow inexorable journey into old age.
So what does all this have to do with architecture? I think of human health as a maintenance problem. I test my blood on occasion for sugar levels, and its like pulling out the dipstick on my car to see if the oil is dirty.
And the architecture lesson of the day is: Is catastrophic collapse better than prolonged and increasing degradation of the senses? Or is there such a thing as graceful degradation that robs slowly but systematically?
Condition based maintenance (CBM) is a technique that has lately come into popularity. “The goal of CBM is to perform maintenance only upon evidence of need.” [Defense Acquisition University] The idea is that pulling vehicles into the depot for scheduled maintenance (especially when not required, to play safe) is not always a good one, when there is pressure to perform their mission and their presence is needed elsewhere. Instead, sensors on board are constantly screaming the health of the vehicle and predictive algorithms are used to determine impending failure.
Boy, I would like to order ten of those! Every enterprise needs predictive maintenance because both preventive and breakdown maintenance are so expensive. Predictive maintenance can only come with enterprise dashboards and smart algorithms as well as a lot of heuristics needed to tune the “predictions”.
In the meantime I am hoping that predictive maintenance for human beings is just around the corner and that one finger stick and dipstick reading of the blood is enough to warn me of all sorts of bad things coming at me, not just my sugar levels.
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