HAROLD AS FEEDBACK’S FOIL

IMPROVISATIONAL COMEDY AND ARCHITECTURE

Sarah Hirschman

Architects speak about the needs of users with program diagrams in project proposals, and sometimes they perform post-occupancy surveys, but most often the ideas that drive a conceptual design aren’t ever actually tested in a real way, nor do they benefit from feedback. We’re left with a disconnect between intention and results. In comedy, the test of efficacy is immediate and results are clear—if someone laughs at a joke, it’s a success. Looking closely at the way humour works, then, could potentially reveal clues about how architecture might incorporate feedback into its design process. In hisJokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud writes that the joke is “a double-dealing rascal who serves two masters at once. Everything in jokes that is aimed at gaining pleasure is calculated with an eye toward the third person […] and this gives us a full impression of how indispensable this third person is for the completion of the joking process.”1 The joke has two-way communication built into it; it is a call that demands a response to properly function. The joke is a social act as well as a creative one. Jokes invite responses, and while they might be quite different from those architects seek to induce, the way they operate as a deliberate exchange of information can teach us something about being consciously responsive in the design process.

Feedback generally refers to something exterior to the process of designing—the collection of data from clients or users. Not only does there lack a clear rubric for interpretation of this data, there’s no standard mandate to collect it. How do we weigh the reported experience of one constituency over another, and how do we confirm the conclusions others make? Who decides what data gets collected and how it gets used? This essay proposes a new model for understanding communication and collaboration in the design process following Keller Easterling’s observation: “Architects typically love manners, utopias and crises. We love to make difficult questions harder. We love to train [ourselves] to do labourintensive tasks,” and so “a better role for the architect is not that of an optimizer but that of a comedian.”2 The architect’s comedy is increasingly conversational, especially as worksharing software like Autodesk Revit imposes a continual call-and-response