Clic The Technology

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Once you are at the place where you are ready to discuss your work with others, start with your peers and colleagues. They may be art school buddies, former teachers, studio mates, an interested work colleague, or someone you met at an opening. Calling upon trusted friends and artists to exchange studio visits allows you to engage in regular discussions about the work as well as a range of topics. Studio visits are primarily opportunities to foster a dialogue about your practice. They are helpful when you have come to an interesting juncture, are stuck in a rut needing a push, or seeking responses to new work. They range from the laid-back drop-ins with friends to more formally scheduled meetings. Studio visits introduce your work to professionals
in the art community. It is a chance to present your work on your own turf, get feedback, and lay the foundation for a future working partnership. Your studio is a personal place where you have spent many hours wrestling with your ideas and materials. No matter how eager you are to share your work, for many reasons allowing someone else in can be dicey. You feel vulnerable in the studio; therefore it can be hard to hear suggestions or even well-meaning criticism. The memory of those comments lingers and may haunt you for weeks afterwards, as you struggle with feeling unsure of yourself and become reclusive. Whereas, if someone is effusive and excited by your work, you feel high for days. You’ll want to throw open the doors and invite everyone in. You never know which way it’s going to go. That’s why your readiness and preparation are important. It takes practice to learn how to elicit productive information and steer a conversation for your own benefit without controlling it. With experience you will learn when to talk, when to be quiet, and how to listen without becoming defensive. Studio visits build on each other.

Yes, dreams can come true, but only if you allow yourself to have them. I realize that at this point you may be feeling skeptical. That’s okay and perfectly normal. The concept of planning seems counter-intuitive to an artist’s life. So many factors are out of your control. How can you predict the future? How can having a dream help your career? Isn’t it all about talent and knowing the right people? Right now you’ll just have to trust that entering into this process will quell some of your doubts and help you move ahead. Let your natural curiosity take over. It’s similar to the questioning process you use to make your art: a willingness to explore unknown territory, engage multiple possibilities, and follow a line of thinking to see what happens.

Now is the time to be equally curious about you. One of the features of planning is that you’ll never achieve more than the vision that guides you. For example, no athlete is ever selected for the Olympics by sheer accident. To prepare to compete at that level, Olympic athletes begin with an innate interest in a sport and some natural abilities that they hone through years of hard training motivated by a compelling vision of their future gold-medal performance. Your vision is comprised of your needs, desires, and abilities all working together to shape your destiny. Now is the time to imagine how you would like your artistic life to unfold.

During production, you manage the programmers’ tasks and schedules. However, there’s a difference between assigning tasks and scheduling them. Although you decide who does what, the actual schedule should be a roll-up of the coders’ own estimates of how long it will take to complete these tasks. As the project continues, track each developer’s estimates against actual results so that you can help them learn how to get better at estimating. Then, as you close in on the final third of the project, these estimates will become a useful tool to help you load-balance and to decide which features you can deliver and which you must cut.

Because the technical world is such foreign territory to non-programmers, you must become adept at explaining technical issues. Demystify them as much as possible. Don’t take the “high priest” approach and claim that you’re the only one qualified to make technical decisions. Instead, share your knowledge with the team so that you can all make intelligent choices together. In particular, you should be able to explain technical trade-offs to the producer. A project can be optimized for schedule, cost, quality (lack of bugs), or user satisfaction (great game play), but not all four at once. There are choices that must be made every day of the project’s life, and you’re the one who must explain those choices well enough for everyone to understand them.

The thermal performance of smaller buildings, such as houses or commercial structures under about 5000 square feet, is usually dominated by the nature of exterior building surfaces. The heating, cooling, and ventilation requirements are largely determined by the orientation and massing of the structure; the amount of insulation; the size, type, and orientation of glazing; shading provisions; amount of thermal storage mass; and potential
for natural ventilation. Except in unusual cases, the internal heat gain due to lighting or electrical equipment demands or from occupancy densities is relatively unimportant. These skin load–dominated (SLD) buildings are ideal candidates for passive climatic design approaches. After years of research and application in numerous designs throughout the world, we can say unequivocally that this climatic design approach works! With simple design efforts you can economically reduce heating demand by 30 percent in Chicago or 80 percent in Los Angeles. With more aggressive design and construction measures, these levels of performance can be exceeded. It is also easy to greatly reduce cooling demands. Conceptually, the architect should make the building resistant to the negative climatic forces and welcoming to the positive climatic forces. This is where an understanding of the site climate and the thermal requirements of the occupants and the building over time comes into play.