Garbage In - Garbage Out
“Garbage In - Garbage Out” is one of the universal principles of design, which I first heard from my architect colleague in reference to the many high-tech tools we keep adopting in the practice of architecture. His point then was that no miraculous piece of software (cough…Revit…) can make up for lack of thought on behalf of the user.
It means what it sounds like: the product of your work is only as good as what you put into it. Garbage can happen in two ways:
The low quality of input (example above) and
The wrong kind of input.
A classic example of the wrong kind of input garbage is the 1999 NASA Mars Climate Orbiter disaster. In this story illustrating the pitfalls of the U.S. stubbornly sticking to the English units despite the rest of the world united in the adoption of the Standard International metric system, the critical data was entered in the wrong kind of units.
The error originated in the design phase, when the makers of the spacecraft (Lockheed Martin) used the English units of acceleration (pounds per second per second) and the engineers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab assumed that the units have been converted to metric, a standard for space missions.
The units have not been converted.
At almost 5 times the intended acceleration, the Orbiter reenacted the Greek tragedy of Icarus: it got too close to the Mars atmosphere, burning and disintegrating into smithereens.
There is more to the story, of course, along the lines of cutting costs and inadequate quality control. The error could have been caught and corrected. But the result remains the same:
Garbage In - Garbage Out.
In our work, it is essential to take care and ensure both high quality of initial information (for example, the building program or topo survey) and the appropriate language used to communicate the design intent. The former can be achieved by adopting a systematic process of discovery and the latter - by quality control during design and documentation.
In short, garbage does not belong in good design. Unless, of course, we are talking about Copenhill, the mind-bending trash-to-energy plant that doubles as a ski park in Copenhagen, Denmark!
