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What Air Conditioning Can Teach Us About Innovation and Laziness (vice.com)
In a think piece for Vice's Motherboard Ernie Smith argues that the invention of air conditioning in 1902 has had a big impact on the innovation we've made since. Smith, citing several studies and articles on the matter, states that it is because of air conditioners that we have things like skyscrapers, clean rooms for building advanced computer chips, shopping malls, and multiplexes. But on the other hand, air conditioners have somewhat limited our creativity in home and office designing. From the article:See, prior to the air conditioner reaching homes around the country, architects had to think more creatively about keeping people cool when options were more limited. This meant taking advantage of breezes, room design, and dimensional layout in a way that maximized the heat when it was necessary kept things cool when it wasn't. And it meant taking advantage of foliage around the home to build in some natural shade, as well as to build porches, which were often much cooler than the insides of homes during warm days.The article, among other things, also mentions that we are currently looking for ways to curtail the energy wastage that incurs because of ACs. But Smith points out that it took us a while -- generations, actually -- before we started to see a problem and began working on it. From the article:"One of the many ways in which we have become cognitively lazy is to accept our initial impression of the problem that [we encounter]. Once we settle on an initial perspective we don't seek alternative ways of looking at the problem," author Michael Michalko wrote. "Like our first impressions of people, our initial perspective on problems and situations are apt to be narrow and superficial. We see no more than we expect to see based on our past experiences in life, education and work." [...] It's hard to even get mad at architects who chose simple efficiency over complexity, or (to highlight a contemporary example) early carmakers that went with gasoline instead of something better for the environment. Because of human nature, it just makes sense that despite all the other advantages that came with air conditioning, the more challenging things that came with the invention -- the fact that conservation and efficiency still have their place -- didn't initially get their due.
The US government used to pretty much shut down in the Summer months. Anyone who's experienced DC Summer weather will know why. With the advent of air conditioning, those weasels are around stirring up trouble for the taxpayers 12 months out of the year. It totalitarian government ever comes to the US, blame air conditioning.
Air conditioning is a great advance because it limits the amount of people who die during heat waves. This is definitely a good thing. Refrigeration is a related technology, which also has great benefits for preventing sickness from food-borne illnesses and reducing hunger. These are most definitely good things. And I don't think they should cause laziness. It's expensive to operate air conditioning too much and it's worthwhile to keep utility bills down. Techniques that increase air flow and reduce the need for cooling are still very much relevant, perhaps more so than ever. Besides, a large portion of the world doesn't have access to air conditioning much of the time, so those techniques are still very important in those places. This story comes across to me as bullshit.
What about customers? You can design whatever you want, but will it sell? It's easy to design a new kind of car. It's not easy to design a car to replace a gasoline-powered one. It's called range anxiety. That's why most cars are gasoline-powered. No need for mysterious psychology.
Yes, A/C has made designing buildings for maximum airflow a relatively low priority, but there are definite trade-offs.
Areas of the world that couldn't really be habitable for the summers are now usable. The more tropical latitudes tend to not have issues with snow piles closing roads, potholes, and such, so for businesses, they have pretty much the entire year for operation, as opposed to northern climates that might have to shut down due to whiteout conditions for days at a time. This is why businesses tend to move to more southern areas.
"Once we settle on an initial perspective we don't seek alternative ways of looking at the problem,"
You mean "if it ain't broke, dont fix it?" Sounds like reasonable advice to me. The article's line of thinking is how the world wound up with Walmart.
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However, before air conditioning existed, people had to be creative when trying to stay comfortable in sweltering conditions.
Here are five different ways that people across the United States beat the heat in the 1800s and early 1900s.
"... in a way that maximized the heat when it was necessary kept things cool when it wasn't."
I'm sorry, what? I can't parse this sentence at all
Once they pick a suspect, right or wrong, they look no further. That's how we settled on Bin Laden for 9/11. Look no further, or you might be embarrassed, or found guilty of the crime yourself!
Bad design is mainly due to cost-cutting. There are numerous examples in contemporary design: A wall switch goes to an outlet for a standing lamp, to avoid running wire to a ceiling fixture and avoid the cost of the fixture. Rooms are smaller and shorter to save on materials costs; squarer to avoid expensive details. Wood trim around doors and windows is reduced in size or eliminated. Window area is kept to the legal minimum. Doors are hollow, providing no sound insulation. Those are all cases of cost-cutting, with no thought given to practicality or aesthetics. The result is people living in bland, dispiriting boxes.
Ideas like designing for cross-ventilation, large windows on the west side, and less windows on the north side in colder areas are good ideas for making a space livable, regardless of whether there's AC. Even people using central heat/AC can usually open windows throughout much of the year for fresh air. Arguably the laziness is on the part of the people who are willing to live in bland, stuffy boxes and rent hotel rooms with windows that don't open.
We're not "cognitively lazy" because we didn't seek alternatives to AC.
We don't WANT alternatives to AC.
The simple fact is that one AC'd room is still cooler than a patio with a breeze in the summer.
Like lamps it allows us to be more productive in the hot months when generally people (in New York for example) would go to the Catskills where it was generally cooler weather.
AC isn't efficient. Well duh. Neither is heating but I don't see this cognitively lazy researcher arguing against reduced uses of heaters in the winter months. We accept these costs of part of living and they HAVE been made more efficient. Same reason we can't get off of oil - it's THE most efficient fuel source in terms of energy output potential per unit.
Now, frankly, I think it's be cool (heh) if each house had its own, sealed, micro nuclear reactor to provide heat and power AC and homes... But somehow I think mr "cognitive lazy" here would object to that as well...
The article, among other things, also mentions that we are currently looking for ways to curtail the energy wastage that incurs because of ACs.
Come on, now, there is no evidence that we AC's waste more energy than logged-in users.
"architects who chose simple efficiency over complexity"
That was not the architects decision. The architect simply fulfilled the business requirements he received. Most likely those where "as many apartments as possible" and "cheap". As with most business decisions, these requirements are fueled by the knowledge that the average end customer is rather short-sighted and is more likely to buy cheap now and pay for energy in perpetuity than pay a bit more from the start.
The problem is not with the architect, nor with the business side of things, they just supply what the customer buys. It is this typical human short-sightedness from the typical consumer. This is why regulation is needed (and/or steep energy prices factoring in the damage energy use does) to fix these kind of problems.
But. One of the greatest lies ever told is that people need to be comfortable to be happy. It's what you're used to. We could, have, and do learn to live without the comforts of modern privilege.
It's not at all surprising these comforts come with some sort of downside.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Well people tried to deal with heat in architecture since like 1000 years B.C.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just look for clues in architecture of nations living in constantly hot climate.
AC is OK when you need it (in car f.e.) but I do prefer other cooling methods if it can be achieved.
Given the abundance of mosquitoes where I live, I'm completely certain I prefer my AC to the "creativity" of sitting on the porch feeding the bloodsucking bastards.
Also, sleeping (or trying) while soaked in sweat isn't particularly good for my creativity afterwards. So IMO thanks god for AC.
Once we settle on an initial perspective we don't seek alternative ways of looking at the problem," author Michael Michalko wrote. "Like our first impressions of people, our initial perspective on problems and situations are apt to be narrow and superficial. We see no more than we expect to see based on our past experiences in life, education and work." [...] (to highlight a contemporary example) early carmakers that went with gasoline instead of something better for the environment.
Early car designers tried all kinds of different power sources: electricity, steam, and internal combustion. It turned out that gasoline was the best alternative and hasn't (yet) been replaced by anything else. There was talk of using gas turbines for a while but they're too expensive and finicky. Maybe battery/electric will replace gasoline in the future when the technology advances to the point it's a viable alternative.
His point about air conditioning in building makes no sense either; architects design building for specific purposes - office space, retail shopping, manufacturing, whatever. New building techniques and materials are constantly being introduced. Could a building be designed for passive cooling today? Sure, but very few people would want it in place of central air conditioning. Being creative is one thing, building a product people actually want is something else entirely. And his rant about window unit air conditioners makes no sense at all; no building is designed to use window units, they're a hack. Sheesh
When I do a quick search for passive cooling design, I see plenty of ideas, primarily aimed a people building solar powered houses. But, that's the thing, the house you get when you build the design you want is vastly different from the house you get when you buy something designed to look good enough and maximize profit for a real estate developer.
The advent of modern HVAC created freedom to design buildings any way we want now- we are no longer constrained by a small number of design parameters. Citing the large number of boring buildings as a sign of laziness and decline is just lazy thinking itself.
Sure, 90% of modern buildings are crap designs. That's because 90% of everything is crap- always has been, always will be. The good stuff now has a much wider variety and more innovative thinking.
The invention of A/C didn't damage creativity. Pre A/C, you were *limited and constrained* and had to build porches, limited placement of foliage, and more it less constrained you to do something to deal with the temperature extremes. With A/C, you can make the buildings any shape, any size, with any landscaping, etc. You can make the architecture *any way you like* without even considering the weather or sun. That enable unlimited creativity. Many of the large cities that current exist in North America would be either miserable or unlivable. Do you think you are going to get a city like Phoenix with natural cooling?
If you want to use less air conditioning, don't live in Dallas. Or Phoenix. Or Las Vegas.
...laura
I'm not an engineer, and while I could do my research, this is slashdot.
How viable is solar powered air conditioning? The more sunny, hotter area's and times of year would benefit from such a device as it takes the load off the grid, and peak sun output times tend to be the hottest part of the day, which also coincides with the peak power usage of the day.
...between livable and comfortable.
Before air conditioning, creative building design made living livable, as long as you didn't do much.
Air conditioning made buildings comfortable. And you can do a lot more if you're comfortable.
Vice is finding ways to make us feel guilty about air conditioning? I got the preachy creeps down my spine halfway through reading this. Human nature?
A really clever system using a pipe buried undergorund to cool air, and a heated air duct on top of the home to draw air out, so the lower pressure would draw air through the buried pipe. The surrounding ground would cool the air as it traveled through the pipe, and when it came up in your home it would be substantially cooler than the ambient air temperature.
We're starting to adopt the same concept again in newer homes. Turns out dirt tends to stay cooler than the air in summer, and warmer than the air in winter. So you just bury a bunch of water pipes undergorund and use that as your heat sink/source for your heat pump. In summer it cools the home by pumping the heat underground into the dirt, in winter it heats the home by pumping the heat out from the dirt underground.
The same argument can be made with the invention of light bulbs and not modeling homes with sunlight in mind anymore.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Areas of the world that couldn't really be habitable for the summers are now usable.
In some cases. In others that has more to do with hydro engineering than air conditioning. You could have all the air conditioning in the world and without vast water projects Las Vegas and Phoenix couldn't exist (and arguably shouldn't).
The more tropical latitudes tend to not have issues with snow piles closing roads, potholes, and such
I live in the north and we don't have problems with roads getting closed by snow. Not ever. Some mountainous areas do but they know how to deal with it. Potholes are genuinely not a big deal except in rare cases. Once in a while one causes a flat tire and even that is not super common. Biggest issue they cause is some expense for road maintenance.
as opposed to northern climates that might have to shut down due to whiteout conditions for days at a time.
You've never actually been to the north have you? Businesses in the north almost never shut down for any reason related to weather. I've lived in the Midwest much of my life and we just know how to deal with snow. We have the equipment and experience to deal with it. In fact we tend to think of those in the south as a bunch of pansies when it comes to dealing with bad weather. When I lived a bit further south they would shut the city down for a 1/4 inch of snowfall, or as those of us further north refer to it, no snow.
This is why businesses tend to move to more southern areas.
Manufacturing businesses have moved to southern climates for various reasons but weather is rarely one of them. Unions and labor costs are the biggest reason in most cases. Tax incentives can be another big one. Southern states have been aggressively courting manufacturing businesses. Weather doesn't really play into it.
How viable is solar powered air conditioning?
Hard to power an AC system solely from solar (needs a lot of panels) economically but it can pretty readily offset the cost and amount of grid energy needed even with just a few. Even better it tends to provide the most power precisely when it is hottest. A lot of places already use solar for hot water tanks and I suspect as the price of solar continues to fall you'll start to see it more for AC and other household power needs. There are some businesses like grocery stores which have put solar panels on the roof to offset the refrigeration costs.
If you don't believe in the green religion, then your Air Conditioner isn't sinful and you don't need to look backward.
"Cognitive Laziness" isn't the same thing as "refusing to waste time on problems you don't need to solve because there's a ready solution at-hand".
You might as well say that we've become 'cognitively lazy' because we don't bother going out to stalk, hunt, and kill game, instead just 'lazily' going to pick up food from the grocery store.
In other words, this whole 'cognitive laziness' thing is a weakly warmed-over Victorian social Darwinistic argument that "modern conveniences make humans lazy".
-Styopa
If this constitutes "news for nerds", I can't even comprehend what an active embrace of ignorance would look like.
Google already solved this one. Pipe in enough outside air to draw off the heat at a reasonable cpu temperature. Since the CPU doesn't need to be at human-comfortable temperatures, you don't need active cooling unless the outside temperature gets too high to keep the CPU at a temperature within its spec.
If you have the ability to choose the geographic location of your data center, then just pick a spot where the temperature never goes above what you need.
I don't about you, but security is very important to me. Without A/C my domicile would be much less secure.
You had me thinking about some of the premises until the comment about "early carmakers that went with gasoline instead of something better for the environment." Oh my hell, when can we dispense with the bullshit? First of all, in case you hadn't noticed (which you haven't), oil is a natural product. Arrgh. Secondly, what pray tell would you suggest be used instead of gasoline, especially in the early 1900's? Hell, electric vehicles are barely viable now, with 2016 technology, and the entire lifecycle of an electric vehicle is proving to be no more envronmentaly friendly than gas powered ones.
With the advent of AC, it has provided opportunity for architects to tackle far more complex and innovative problems because they don't have to worry (as much) about the mundane issue of cooling. Far thing from being lazy.
In the context of +AC we get a lot more work done in a lot more condensed brain power spaces in all weather but true design for natural cooling or heat dissipation is less valuable in that context. Not surprising. All powerful innovation changes the context and thus what is of relative value compared to what else. So?
The biggest impact had air conditioning on the South of the US. It is a hot and steamy place and without AC far less businesses could operate there and attract people to live there. As far as energy wasting goes, I am still waiting for the industry to make just one window unit that fits a standard size sliding window. Over the years I found that none of them fit right, no matter how much I wiggle them into place.
New reality show based on extreme weather,
You expose people to the opposite weather they are accustomed to. Not sure if Rednecks would do better in the cold up North than Yankees down here in the summer when it is 95+ in the shade.
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