#i drew this very quickly so I might revise and draw more designs later

[purplepenguintime]

You know what? I like you! Transfems your Hunter:

[elmidol]

Error: Program Not Found - Six

Summary:  You are in charge of programming the droids that work most closely with both General Hux and Kylo Ren. Unbeknownst to you, each of these two men have it in their heads that your relationship extends beyond the workplace. This causes things to escalate quickly when your two apparently secret boyfriends compare notes on their respective partner who is far too similar for their liking.

Read on AO3

“Why can’t you just tell me what you feel, because the way you act is confusing me.”

 Six: Confessions

You were given plenty of space by your coworkers for the remainder of the day. The foul mood that you fell into as you considered the fact that someone had put in an official complaint pertaining to your work worsened with time. A part of you was angry with Kylo Ren and General Hux both; with the former, that he had been there to conduct the test, while with the latter that he hadn’t said it was unnecessary from the start. The First Order was thorough, but so were you. In all the work that you had done for them, you had not given them a chance to question that. One small mistake that had not even been yours, that single thing had cast enough doubt that they had followed through with an official test. The audacity of Kylo Ren, flirting with you as he conducted the test!

 Your upper lip began to draw back so that your teeth were revealed in a snarl. Catching sight of your reflection on the surface of a training droid, you forced your features to relax. TeeArr accepted the round, ball-like droid from you when you tilted it into the protocol droid’s grasp. This was how the training droids left your care to be entrusted with the maintenance crew that would run a mock program as a means of ensuring the droids were at last in working order. This was also the method that those in maintenance had been using to send you other training droids when they required additional programming. Only Eddard braved coming to you directly.

 It was without a doubt that all in the training facility were aware that you had been tested. No one had said a word regarding the matter, which meant that they had known ahead of time. That well explained their tardiness; they had trickled into the area ten to fifteen minutes late. Each person that had arrived had glanced your way. Those kriffing knowing expressions. At the very least it had confirmed your suspicions as to who had lodged the complaint. That sleemo maintenance lead, who right then was stifling a yawn with the back of his hand. He had been ignoring you since he had arrived and in some ways you preferred it this way. The urge to argue with him would have been too great, but that was nothing more than petty behavior that would reflect badly on you.

 Work on the TIE droid for Millicent had been delayed when the engineer assigned to the project had been called into a consultation meeting for another. This was not something that you hadn’t planned for given how common such an occurrence was. Instead of speaking with the engineer later, your plan was to draft up a better outline of the physical therapy droids that you wanted to help design.

 Eddard’s hands wrapped around the droid as you finished disconnecting it from your datapad. You tilted back your head, forced a smile, and asked if he had been assigned any new projects. “Not yet,” he said with a shrug. “You got something?”

 You repeated the first two words of his response to you in unison with making a vague hand gesture in the air to imply that you were working your way towards that goal. Speaking to him had also occurred due to the ulterior motive of you wanting to focus on something more positive to help soften your mood. The anger would otherwise fester to the point that you were blinded by rage when you were at last able to begin outlining the physical therapy droid proposal. Shooting yourself in the foot was not something that you were interested in. On top of that, the only other distraction that your mind had been able to conjure was to think of the way that Kylo Ren had flirted with you. You were not ready to go there just yet.

 With slightly improved spirits you sank into your work for the hours that followed. TeeArr was on his best behavior even after you left the training area with him. There was nothing on your schedule aside from the aforementioned self-appointed task. You had decided to utilize your time as best you could by sending TeeArr off for cleaning while you went to your quarters. The quietude of the room was welcome and more than a little refreshing after a day of repairs. You had not realized that a headache had been forming from the noise until the noise was taken away. Also adding to the tension was that ever lingering memory of Kylo Ren’s flirtations.

 You were not opposed to the idea entirely. It was more that you had never given much thought to it. He hadn’t seemed the type and you were busy. This allowed your thoughts to wander to General Hux and whatever lady he was involved with. How did he do it? The man was busy beyond all reason. You did not see how he could properly juggle a relationship with the duties that were assigned to him. Your mind offered you the memory of how he had treated you.

 Shoving all of that aside, you opened up the file that you had previously started for the project proposal and set to work. You typed up revisions and tentative programs that could be used alongside characteristics from medical droids that would be beneficial to the new ones. You were midway through one of the revisions when a summons from the engineer on the Millicent project arrived. Huffing, you completed the task, saved the file, and packed away your things. It was not that you weren’t pleased to see that work would begin closer to schedule, but more that you hated to have the flow of creativity interrupted.

 The engineer, whose badge read Aelin, was already building a part of the droid by the time you entered. “Was the meeting cut short?”

 “Complications,” Aelin said. He drummed his finger on the surface of the worktable that housed multiple components. “You’ve never been one for gossip, but this one might be worth your while.” You could not contain the urge to roll your eyes. “General Hux and Kylo Ren are, apparently, dating the same woman.”

 You scowled at the news. Not only was this woman two-timing General Hux; Kylo Ren was two-timing her by flirting with you! You felt sullied. Shoulders slouching, you wrinkled your nose in distaste This was the sort of gossip that you wanted nothing to do with. At the same time, a part of you was thankful that Aelin had informed you since you had started to toy with the idea of accepting Kylo Ren’s flirtations.

 “I wasn’t there for the revelation, but Maker if I don’t wish I had been.” You did not share these sentiments. Aelin cleared his throat. “That isn’t why I called you. I’ve been informed of the other project that you will soon be proposing.” A nod from you was all that he needed by way of encouragement to continue. “I would not be in a position to accept the role of lead engineer even if it were asked of me, however I hope that you will recommend that I play a part in it?” A smile spread across your features. Aelin, despite the joy he received from gossip, was someone that you liked more and more as you worked with him.

 You took a seat at one of the unused desks in the room. Aelin had an idea to expand on your droid proposal. While physical therapy droids were beneficial to those recovering from maladies and injuries, there were other issues that officers faced on a more daily basis. Not only officers, but technicians, mechanics, and programmers as well. He shot you a wink as he said this. You smirked to yourself. He was not flirting with you, otherwise you would have found yourself uncomfortable given what you had learned of Kylo Ren’s behavior. Aelin was very much devoted to his partner and uninterested in females.

 The engineer’s addition to your project would utilize the same programming involved in encouraging those the droid was assigned to. This would be to help them complete tasks and remain on target for set deadlines. As Aelin spoke, you typed out his words to be edited once the idea was more fleshed out. You had to be careful to show how these two projects tied into one another otherwise you could be facing a rejection on the basis of overcomplicating things. These droids would be a little more aggressive than their counterparts, albeit not in the sense that they were violent towards the person. An anti procrastination droid that was adaptable to a person’s mental and physical limitations. You could see precisely how this would tie into what you had already been proposing.

 Just as you were typing up a note for how best to merge the two ideas so that they fit together as a single project, the door opened faster than it should have been able to. Your head jerked in that direction. General Hux had his finger pressed on the button that opened the door, meanwhile Kylo Ren had one hand extended out to the side. You never did like when he used the Force in ways that would damage property. You also hated how both men had their attention glued to you. General Hux was glaring and you could only imagine that Kylo Ren was doing the same if his posture gave you any indication.

 “You were rather clever with the TR8-0R name. Was that a joke?”

 “I’m sorry?” It felt like your brain had stopped functioning properly. Aelin ducked down behind the desk that he had been working at. His hands drew the portions of the TIE droid he was working on with him. You looked away from the engineer to face the two men that you worked for.

 General Hux’s lip curled back in a snarl. The disgust that was present in his gaze fought against disappointment and hurt. You flinched at the sight of it and wondered again what it was that you were being accused of. You were doing what you could to be understanding. The blow to his pride because of his girlfriend’s actions would be a fresh wound. It confused you further, therefore, that he had allowed Kylo Ren to accompany him. Or was Kylo Ren simply that cruel? The two men often bickered in regards to work methods. This was very different, and you were at a loss for how to conduct yourself.

 Glancing first at General Hux then at Kylo Ren and back again, you set aside your datapad and rose to your feet. Kylo Ren had his hands curled into fists. General Hux’s glare had not lessened in intensity.

 “I swear to the Maker that I was unaware of what was going on in your personal life. The TR8-0R droids, that name, had nothing to do with--”

 “My personal life?” he snapped, cutting you off and taking a step forward. You recoiled. Ducked your head and furrowed your brow while looking towards the masked face to General Hux’s side. Kylo Ren had started to open his hands. His relaxed stance did not last for long, however, as he clenched his hands into fists again. “There is confirmation that you engaged in flirtatious behavior with Kylo Ren. Do not deny it. You are the guilty party as much as he is.”

 You blinked thrice in rapid succession. “He, uhm, yes flirted with me. I did not--what does that have to do with…” Realization began to dawn on you. What Aelin had said the latest gossip was repeated in your head. “One moment. Let’s get something straight: I’ve never dated either of you!”

 There was a sound coming from where Aelin remained hidden behind the desk. It was like a soft gasp that drew attention to the fact that he had been working on the project. He failed to resume after seeming to recover from the shock of how you had spoken to Kylo Ren and General Hux. That, or his surprise stemmed from the rumored girlfriend having been revealed. You had to admit that you were just as stunned, and you tried to go over any behavior that you had exhibited that would have given them this impression. It also shed light onto their behavior. The flirtation. The gift of lotion.

 Kylo Ren had stiffened when you had denied having been involved with him. General Hux had looked as though you had physically slapped him. They turned to study one another. Perhaps wondering if you were trying to save face, if you were covering for your boyfriend by denying things in public. In order to set things clear you pointed to each of them in turn and repeated what you had said.

 “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression, and I can assure you, General Hux, that I would not have accepted the lotion if I had known.”

 Kylo Ren stepped closer. You winced as he raised his hand and reached for your face. In truth you had expected him to use the Force to harm you given his track record with First Order personnel. Instead he cupped the side of your face with that gloved hand. The leather was smooth save for on the seams, which dragged along the flesh of your cheek. You trembled at his touch, still waiting to be hurt. General Hux moved forward. He knew better than to lay his hands on Kylo Ren and so splayed a hand on your chest to shove at you instead. Not hard enough to force you to the ground, thankfully, but enough where you stumbled backwards a few steps. The two men once more faced one another with tension so thick it made your breath catch in your throat.

 “Perhaps we should discuss this in a more comfortable setting.” You did not want to discuss it at all. The idea of doing so was more nerve racking than any work proposal you had ever given. It did not escape your notice that General Hux and Kylo Ren were both reluctant to release these romantic feelings they had for you. Nor were they giving into anger now that they had been made aware you had not cheated on either of them. Whatever delusion they had been entertaining themselves with, they wanted to make it a reality.

 Before anything more got underway, you wanted clarity on how a conversation revolving around their “girlfriend” had occurred. Voicing as much in a respectful tone, you received another round of silence that was followed by General Hux clearing his throat. The redhead shot a glowering look in Kylo Ren’s direction while he spoke. The test that you had been forced to undergo had led to General Hux commenting that having a work-driven significant other contained many benefits. Kylo Ren had responded in surprise that they agreed on anything. That devolved--your words, not his--into comparisons as to what made their girlfriend the superior one. Despite the differences highlighted in their respective observations, the similarities had been too eerie.

 This changed things for you. Nevertheless annoyed by the misunderstanding, you were suddenly quite flattered that they each had praise for your character. They respected you as more than a worker. Then again, you thought, it was this idea of you that they had, those versions that they had fallen in love or lust with and some deluded relationship with. Aelin was surely getting a kick out of this. TeeArr’s absence was quite the blessing.

 That thought led to another, specifically the nature of Kylo Ren’s flirting and what had inspired him to be so bold. Your cheeks began to grow warm with the realization that he had most likely been imagining you in compromising positions when the droid had mentioned the pornographic holovids. You averted your face and raised your hands to block your countenance from view. These actions silenced General Hux, who had been asking if you had truly been so oblivious to his affections. You could not focus on that. Instead you were thinking of the proposal that you had been working on for the physician therapy and anti procrastination droids. A chunk of the notes that you had typed up had been written with General Hux in mind as one of the audience members. Everything was falling apart.

 You forced yourself to calm down by taking a deep breath and standing as straight as you could. “General Hux? Commander Ren?” The former nodded while the latter did not react at all. “Is this going to have an impact on the droid proposal? Or any of the other projects?”

 General Hux opened his mouth to speak then paused and closed it. He thought for a moment before again opening his mouth. This time he did say, “I will recuse myself from the board for the proposal. It is not by any bias that I find the droids beneficial to the First Order. As for the project with Millicent, perhaps it would be misguided to continue work within my quarters. A new location will be set up for you to observe Millicent with the droid once it has undergone the basic tests.”

 Both you and General Hux looked to Kylo Ren for his answer. “You are always welcome to my quarters. This changes nothing.” He had a way with making you blush, but you could not say that his words weren’t welcome. The awkwardness of this misunderstanding would have repercussions yet that did not have to include your job itself. You gave a nod of thanks rather than explicitly saying the words for fear that they would imply an acceptance of his invitation to his quarters.

 The two men left together just as they had arrived together. Both glowering at the other. Walking with clenched fists. Their rivalry taking on another layer, this one more personal. You were not thrilled to be a part of that.

 Aelin stood after the door to the room closed. You shot him a half-hearted glare before turning back to your datapad and reopening the file that you had been composing. You scratched the side of your head. It took only a minute for you to decide how best to phrase the proposal now that General Hux’s absence at the meeting was a certainty. Having Aelin’s backing for this project would hold more weight, and you were pleased that his desire to be a part of this had not wavered though he had witnessed what had just transpired. As you typed, you peeked over at the droid part that Aelin had been working on since before you had come. It was larger in size, and you recognized it now as being part of the body.

 Millicent would miss you, you thought, and Eddard would not be oblivious to the fact that the two of you were no longer allowed to enter General Hux’s quarters. The gossip that you so loathed was about you. That would get out. Aelin did not have to utter a word for it to happen. The poor mood that you had been in earlier after the test returned tenfold.

 General Hux had made you wear uncomfortable heels despite believing that the two of you were dating. Kylo Ren had been the one to conduct the test to check for flaws in your work ethics even though he was under the impression that you were his girlfriend. It might be that they did not allow their personal lives to interfere with their work, or it might be that they would make shitty boyfriends.

 A small red circle of light drew you out of your thoughts. You looked up and over at Aelin. He grinned good naturedly and depressed the button that had activated the laser that Millicent would be able to play with when the TIE droid was finished. Dwelling on the negative was not going to do you any good. The present allowed you time to ignore that before others tried to make a greater mess of things.

 “There will be other scandals,” Aelin assured you. “With this one, you might be in luck. Kylo Ren and General Hux do not seem the types to stand for this gossip taking over the lives of everyone here. It’s not good for business. It might, dare I say it, be something that can be used for the droid proposal.” You tilted your head in curiosity. “Procrastination can occur when one becomes more caught up in rumors that add nothing to the First Order. Use this situation to your advantage.” He was not wrong, and you decided that you were going to do exactly that.

[artusarda]

Charles Darwin was twenty-nine years old and single. Two years earlier, he had returned from his voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle with the observations that would eventually form the basis of “On the Origin of Species.” In the meantime, he faced a more pressing analytical problem. Darwin was considering proposing to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, but he worried that marriage and children might impede his scientific career. To figure out what to do, he made two lists. “Loss of time,” he wrote on the first. “Perhaps quarreling. . . . Cannot read in the evenings. . . . Anxiety and responsibility. Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool.” On the second, he wrote, “Children (if it Please God). Constant companion (and friend in old age). . . . Home, & someone to take care of house.” He noted that it was “intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working. . . . Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps.”

Beneath his lists, Darwin scrawled, “Marry, Marry, Marry QED.” And yet, Steven Johnson writes, in “Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most,” “we have no evidence of how he actually weighed these competing arguments against each other.” Johnson, the author of “How We Got to Now” and other popular works of intellectual history, can’t help but notice the mediocrity of Darwin’s decision-making process. He points out that Benjamin Franklin used a more advanced pro-and-con technique: in what Franklin called “Prudential Algebra,” a numerical weight is assigned to each listed item, and counterbalancing items are then eliminated. (“If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three . . . and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies,” Franklin explained to a friend.) Even this approach, Johnson writes, is slapdash and dependent upon intuition. “The craft of making farsighted choices—decisions that require long periods of deliberation, decisions whose consequences might last for years,” he concludes, “is a strangely under-appreciated skill.”

We say that we “decide” to get married, to have children, to live in particular cities or embark on particular careers, and in a sense this is true. But how do we actually make those choices? One of the paradoxes of life is that our big decisions are often less calculated than our small ones are. We agonize over what to stream on Netflix, then let TV shows persuade us to move to New York; buying a new laptop may involve weeks of Internet research, but the deliberations behind a life-changing breakup could consist of a few bottles of wine. We’re hardly more advanced than the ancient Persians, who, Herodotus says, made big decisions by discussing them twice: once while drunk, once while sober.

Johnson hopes to reform us. He examines a number of complex decisions with far-reaching consequences—such as the choice, made by President Barack Obama and his advisers, to green-light the raid on Osama bin Laden’s presumed compound, in Abbottabad, Pakistan—and then shows how the people in charge drew upon insights from “decision science,” a research field at the intersection of behavioral economics, psychology, and management. He thinks that we should apply such techniques to our own lives.

I’ve never had to decide whether to launch a covert raid on a suspected terrorist compound, but I’ve made my share of big decisions. This past summer, my wife and I had a baby boy. His existence suggests that, at some point, I decided to become a father. Did I, though? I never practiced any prudential algebra; rather than drawing up lists of pros and cons and concluding, on balance, that having kids was a good idea, I gradually and unintentionally transitioned from not particularly wanting children to wanting them, and from wanting them to joining my wife in having them. If I made a decision, it wasn’t a very decisive one. In “War and Peace,” Tolstoy writes that, while an armchair general may imagine himself “analyzing some campaign on a map” and then issuing orders, a real general never finds himself at “the beginning of some event”; instead, he is perpetually situated in the middle of a series of events, each a link in an endless chain of causation. “Can it be that I allowed Napoleon to get as far as Moscow?” Tolstoy’s General Kutuzov wonders. “When was it decided? Was it yesterday, when I sent Platov the order to retreat, or was it the evening before, when I dozed off and told Bennigsen to give the orders? Or still earlier?” Unlike the capture of Moscow by Napoleon, the birth of my son was a joyous occasion. Still, like Kutuzov, I’m at a loss to explain it: it’s a momentous choice, but I can’t pinpoint the making of it in space or time.

For Tolstoy, the tendency of big decisions to make themselves was one of the great mysteries of existence. It suggested that the stories we tell about our lives are inadequate to their real complexity. Johnson means to offer a way out of the Tolstoyan conundrum. He wants to make us writers, rather than readers, of our own stories. Doing so requires engaging with one of life’s fundamental questions: Are we in charge of the ways we change?

Ideally, we’d be omniscient and clearheaded. In reality, we make decisions in imperfect conditions that prevent us from thinking things through. This, Johnson explains, is the problem of “bounded rationality.” Choices are constrained by earlier choices; facts go undiscovered, ignored, or misunderstood; decision-makers are compromised by groupthink and by their own fallible minds. The most complex decisions harbor “conflicting objectives” and “undiscovered options,” requiring us to predict future possibilities that can be grasped, confusingly, only at “varied levels of uncertainty.” (The likelihood of marital quarrelling must somehow be compared with that of producing a scientific masterwork.) And life’s truly consequential choices, Johnson says, “can’t be understood on a single scale.” Suppose you’re offered two jobs: one at Partners in Health, which brings medical care to the world’s neediest people, and the other at Goldman Sachs. You must consider which option would be most appealing today, later this year, and decades from now; which would be preferable emotionally, financially, and morally; and which is better for you, your family, and society. From this multidimensional matrix, a decision must emerge.

Professional deciders, Johnson reports, use decision processes to navigate this complexity. Many of the best processes unfold in stages—a divergence stage might precede a convergence stage—and are undertaken by groups. (Darwin might have divided his friends into two opposing teams, in the divergence stage, and then held a debate between them.) The decision might be turned into an iterative adventure. In a series of meetings known as a “design charrette”—the concept is borrowed from the field of product design—a large problem is divided into subproblems, each of which is assigned to a group; the groups then present their work to the whole team, receive feedback, regroup, and revise, in a cycle that loops until a decision has been made. (For architects in nineteenth-century Paris, working en charrette meant revising until the very last minute, even in the cart on the way to deliver a design to a panel of judges.) Charrettes are useful not just because they break up the work but because they force groups with different priorities and sensibilities—coders and designers, architects and real-estate developers—to interact, broadening the range of available viewpoints.

At firms like Royal Dutch Shell, where growth requires investing in expensive ventures, such as ports, wells, and pipelines, deciders use “scenario planning” to imagine how such investments might play out. (A scenario-planning starter kit, Johnson writes, contains three possible futures: “You build one model where things get better, one where they get worse, and one where they get weird.”) Military planners use immersive war games, carried out in the field or around a table, to bring more of the “decision map” into view. In such games, our enemies discover possibilities that we can’t foresee, ameliorating the poverty of our individual imaginations. And since the games can be played over and over, they allow decision-makers to “rewind the tape,” exploring many branches of the “decision tree.”

It would be strange to stage a war game about a prospective marriage. Still, Johnson writes, decision science has lessons for us as individuals. Late in “Farsighted,” he recounts his own use of decision-scientific strategies to persuade his wife to move, with their two children, from New York City to the Bay Area. Johnson starts with intuitions—redwoods are beautiful; the tech scene is cool—but quickly moves beyond them. He conducts a “full-spectrum analysis,” arriving at various conclusions about what moving might mean financially, psychologically (will moving to a new city make him feel younger?), and existentially (will he want to have been “the kind of person who lived in one place for most of his adult life”?). Johnson summarizes his findings in a PowerPoint deck, then shows it to his wife, who raises objections that he hasn’t foreseen (all her friends live in Brooklyn). Eventually, they make a contract. They’ll move, but if after two years she wants to return to New York they’ll do so, “no questions asked”—a rewind.

Seven years later, they’re happy with a bicoastal existence. Would Johnson have benefitted from “conducting a multidisciplinary charrette” to explore his family’s move? Probably not. Still, he writes, the principles of decision science—“seeking out diverse perspectives on the choice, challenging your assumptions, making an explicit effort to map the variables”—constituted “a step up” from the pro-and-con lists that Franklin and Darwin would have made. Looking back on his decision, Johnson can at least feel confident that he made one.

Johnson’s book is part of a long tradition. For centuries, philosophers have tried to understand how we make decisions and, by extension, what makes any given decision sound or unsound, rational or irrational. “Decision theory,” the destination on which they’ve converged, has tended to hold that sound decisions flow from values. Faced with a choice—should we major in economics or in art history?—we first ask ourselves what we value, then seek to maximize that value.

From this perspective, a decision is essentially a value-maximizing equation. If you’re going out and can’t decide whether to take an umbrella, you could come to a decision by following a formula that assigns weights to the probability of rain, the pleasure you’ll feel in strolling unencumbered, and the displeasure you’ll feel if you get wet. Most decisions are more complex than this, but the promise of decision theory is that there’s a formula for everything, from launching a raid in Abbottabad to digging an oil well in the North Sea. Plug in your values, and the right choice pops out.

In recent decades, some philosophers have grown dissatisfied with decision theory. They point out that it becomes less useful when we’re unsure what we care about, or when we anticipate that what we care about might shift. In a 2006 article called “Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting,” the late Israeli philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit asked us to imagine being one of “the early socialist Zionist pioneers” who, at the turn of the twentieth century, dreamed of moving from Europe to Palestine and becoming “the New Jews of their ideals.” Such a change, she observed, “alters one’s life project and inner core”; one might speak of an “Old Person” who existed beforehand, browsing bookshops in Budapest, and a “New Person” who exists afterward, working a field in the desert. The point of such a move isn’t to maximize one’s values. It’s to reconfigure them, rewriting the equations by which one is currently living one’s life.

Ullmann-Margalit doubted that such transformative choices could be evaluated as sound or unsound, rational or irrational. She tells the story of a man who “hesitated to have children because he did not want to become the ‘boring type’ ” that parents tend to become. “Finally, he did decide to have a child and, with time, he did adopt the boring characteristics of his parent friends—but he was happy!” Whose values were maximized—Old Person’s or New Person’s? Because no value-maximizing formula could capture such a choice, Ullmann-Margalit suggested that, rather than describing this man as having “decided” to have children, we say that he “opted” to have them—“opting” (in her usage) being what we do when we shift our values instead of maximizing them.

The nature of “opting situations,” she thought, explains why people “are in fact more casual and cavalier in the way they handle their big decisions than in the way they handle their ordinary decisions.” Yet it’s our unexplored options that haunt us. A decision-maker who buys a Subaru doesn’t dwell on the Toyota that might have been: the Toyota doesn’t represent a version of herself with different values. An opter, however, broods over “the person one did not marry, the country one did not emigrate to, the career one did not pursue,” seeing, in the “shadow presence” implied by the rejected option, “a yardstick” by which she might evaluate “the worth, success or meaning” of her actual life.

One might hope that a little research could bridge the divide between Old Person and New Person. In a 2013 paper titled “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting,” L. A. Paul, a philosopher at Yale, writes, “Perhaps you think that you can know what it’s like to have a child, even though you’ve never had one, because you can read or listen to the testimony of what it was like for others. You are wrong.” Paul cites the philosopher David Lewis, who proposed what might be called the Vegemite Principle: if you’ve never tasted Vegemite, a mysterious and beloved Australian “food spread” made from brewer’s yeast, then neither a description of what it’s like (black, gooey, vegetal) nor experience with other spreads (peanut butter, marmalade, Nutella) will suffice to tell you whether you’d like it. Similarly, Paul argues, “being around other people’s children isn’t enough to learn about what it will be like in your own case.” She explains:

Babysitting for other children, having nieces and nephews or much younger siblings—all of these can be wonderful (or horrible) experiences, but they are different in kind from having a child of your very own, perhaps roughly analogous to the way an original artwork has aesthetic value partly because of its origins. . . . Experience with other people’s children might teach you about what it is like to hold a baby, to change diapers or hold a bottle, but not what it is like to create, carry, give birth to and raise a child of your very own.

Before having children, you may enjoy clubbing, skydiving, and LSD; you might find fulfillment in careerism, travel, cooking, or CrossFit; you may simply relish your freedom to do what you want. Having children will deprive you of these joys. And yet, as a parent, you may not miss them. You may actually prefer changing diapers, wrangling onesies, and watching “Frozen.” These activities may sound like torture to the childless version of yourself, but the parental version may find them illuminated by love, and so redeemed. You may end up becoming a different person—a parent. The problem is that you can’t really know, in advance, what “being a parent” is like. For Paul, there’s something thrilling about this quandary. Why should today’s values determine tomorrow’s? In her 2014 book, “Transformative Experience,” she suggests that living “authentically” requires occasionally leaving your old self behind “to create and discover a new self.” Part of being alive is awaiting the “revelation” of “who you’ll become.”

In the months before our son was born, our sense of our ignorance mounted. “We don’t know what we’re waiting for,” my wife said. We knew in advance when he would be born—an ultrasound had revealed that he was unusually big, and a C-section had been scheduled—but the morning of his arrival unfolded with a strange familiarity. I had coffee, toasted an English muffin, and read the news; I packed clothes for the hospital into the bag that I take to work every day. At eleven, my wife and I got into the car. Her mother and a family friend drove us. At the front entrance, we hugged them goodbye.

“Good luck!” my mother-in-law said. “Your lives are about to change forever!”

“Thanks,” I said. “Where are you guys going?”

“Costco,” she said.

We walked inside. Upstairs, in a curtained-off nook, my wife settled into a hospital bed. For about an hour, we made small talk with the nurses, who guessed at the baby’s weight, and with the surgeon, who happened to be a college classmate of ours. (“Heyyyyy! ” she said when she arrived.) Occasionally we were left to ourselves. We held hands and looked at each other.

Eventually, an aide helped my wife into a wheelchair. Flanked by two nurses and wearing oversized scrubs, I pushed her down a long hallway toward the operating room. Inside, the doctors were listening to “Stairway to Heaven” on the radio. In the midst of it all, I admired Jimmy Page’s guitar solo. Afterward, I sat in the same hallway holding our baby. I had wondered if, meeting him for the first time, I would feel transformed. I felt like the same old me. And yet none of the words I knew matched the experience I was having. With my hands, I felt him breathing. Quiet and still, warm and awake, he watched me with dark-blue eyes—an actual new person.

Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, is skeptical about the idea of sudden transformation. She’s also convinced that, no matter how it looks or feels, we choose how we change. In her often moving, quietly profound book “Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming,” she writes that “becoming a parent is neither something that just happens to you nor something you decide to have happen to you.” Instead, Callard maintains, we “aspire” to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess, just as we might strike a pose in the mirror before heading out on a date. Of the man in Ullmann-Margalit’s article who feared becoming a boring dad, Callard writes, “By the time he says, ‘Let’s go for it,’ he is actively trying to appreciate the values distinctive of parenthood.” In place of a moment of decision, Callard sees a more gradual process: “Old Person aspires to become New Person.”

Suppose that you sign up for a classical-music-appreciation class, in which your first assignment is to listen to a symphony. You put on headphones, press Play—and fall asleep. The problem is that you don’t actually want to listen to classical music; you just want to want to. Aspiring, Callard thinks, is a common human activity: there are aspiring wine lovers, art appreciators, sports fans, fashionistas, d.j.s, executives, alpinists, do-gooders, parents, and religious believers, all hatching plans to value new things. Many ordinary decisions, moreover—such as choosing between Goldman Sachs and Partners in Health—also touch on the question of who we aspire to become.

Callard distinguishes between aspiration and ambition. Some of the people taking the music-appreciation class are ambitious; they enrolled not because they aspire to love classical music but because the class is an easy A. From the first day, they know what they value: their grades. (“Turning ambition into aspiration is one of the job descriptions of any teacher,” Callard notes.) The ambitious students find it easy to explain why they’re taking the class. But the aspirants must grow comfortable with a certain quantity of awkward pretense. If someone were to ask you why you enrolled, you would be overreaching if you said that you were moved by the profound beauty of classical music. The truth, which is harder to communicate, is that you have some vague sense of its value, which you hope that some future version of yourself might properly grasp.

Until aspirants can fully explain their motivations, they often understate their aims. An aspiring painter will say that she finds painting relaxing rather than try to explain what she hopes to express through her art. An aspiration, Callard concludes, has two faces: a near face, which represents it “as lesser than it is,” and a distant one, which an aspirant is reluctant to describe, because it “ennobles her current activity beyond its rightful status.”

Being a well-meaning phony is key to our self-transformations. “Consider what kind of thinking motivates a good student to force herself to listen to a symphony when she feels herself dozing off,” Callard writes:

She reminds herself that her grade and the teacher’s opinion of her depend on the essay she will write about this piece; or she promises herself a chocolate treat when she gets to the end; or she’s in a glass-walled listening room of the library, conscious of other students’ eyes on her; or perhaps she conjures up a romanticized image of her future, musical self, such as that of entering the warm light of a concert hall on a snowy evening.

These are “bad” reasons for listening to classical music, Callard says, but “ ‘bad’ reasons are how she moves herself forward, all the while seeing them as bad, which is to say, as placeholders for the ‘real’ reason.”

When we’re aspiring, inarticulateness isn’t a sign of unreasonableness or incapacity. In fact, the opposite may be true. “Everyone goes to college ‘to become educated,’ ” Callard observes, “but until I am educated I do not really know what an education is or why it is important.” If we couldn’t aspire to changes that we struggle to describe, we’d be trapped within the ideas that we already have. Our inability to explain our reasons is a measure of how far we wish to travel. It’s only after an aspirant has reached her destination, Callard writes, that “she will say, ‘This was why.’ ”

Because aspirations take a long time to come to fruition, they’re always at risk of interruption. Ullmann-Margalit’s 2006 paper makes mention of someone who opts “to leave the corporate world in order to become an artist.” Callard sees that sort of move as the result of an aspiration—a process that starts small, perhaps with a random stroll through an art museum, and culminates, years later, after one opens a pottery studio. The trouble is that some values preclude others. An aspiring artist must reject the corporate virtues to which he once aspired and embrace creative ones in their place. If a family illness forces him to abandon his artistic plans, he may end up adrift—disenchanted with corporate life, but unable to grasp the real satisfactions of an artistic existence. To aspire, Callard writes, is to judge one’s present-day self by the standards of a future self who doesn’t yet exist. But that can leave us like a spider plant putting down roots in the air, hoping for soil that may never arrive.

Callard revisits Paul’s “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting.” In that paper, Paul explored a strange consequence of the Vegemite Principle: if there’s no rational way to decide to have a child—because you can’t know what you’ve never experienced—then there’s also no rational reason for being disappointed about not having one. (Such disappointment isn’t “wrong, or blameworthy, or subjectively unreasonable,” Paul notes—just nonrational.) Callard disagrees. She sees infertility as a form of interrupted aspiration. An aspiring mother who can’t have children is rational in feeling sad, she writes, and “this is so even if—indeed, it is true in part because—she cannot quite see what she would be missing.”

Before we had our son, I began exploring the “near face” of being a parent. I noticed how cute babies and children could be and pictured our spare room as a nursery; I envisaged my wife and I taking our child to the beach near our house (my version of “entering the warm light of a concert hall on a snowy evening”). I knew that these imaginings weren’t the real facts about having children—clearly, there was more to having kids than cuteness. All the same, I had no way of grasping the “distant face” of fatherhood. It was something I aspired to know.

As it turned out, my wife and I had trouble having children. It took us five years to navigate the infertility maze. For much of that time, we lived with what Callard describes as the “distinctive kind of sadness appropriate to losing something you were only starting to try to get to know.” This sadness, Callard points out, has a complement in the disappointment one might feel after “having to abandon one’s educational aspirations for motherhood”: “The aspiring college student who must give up those dreams to raise a child is liable to feel that she was counting on the college experience to make her life meaningful.” Callard quotes from “Barren in the Promised Land,” a book about infertility by the historian Elaine Tyler May. “The grief—the loss,” a woman tells May. “I spent six years of my life trying to be a mom, and it was beyond my control. For a while I couldn’t look ahead. I thought, how do I define myself if I don’t do this? What am I if not a parent?” It might be easier if our biggest transformations were instantaneous, because then we wouldn’t need to live in states of aspiration. Certain of who we were, we’d never get stuck between selves.

I read “Aspiration” last spring, before my son was born, and I talked about it often with my wife. We were especially struck by Callard’s argument that parenthood is intrinsically aspirational. Parents look forward to a loving relationship with a specific person. And yet that person doesn’t pop into existence fully formed; he emerges, in all his specificity, over many years. For this reason, it makes little sense to be an “ambitious parent”—someone who plans, in advance, what he will love about his child. It’s better to “enter parenthood for the most inchoate of reasons,” Callard concludes, since that “puts our children in a position to fill out what parenthood means for us”; in turn, parental love must “be capable of molding itself to the personality that is, itself, coming to take a determinate shape.”

For the most part, Callard’s book is a systematic overview, situated outside the moment. Still, she writes, for aspirants “what happens in the meanwhile is also life.” Now that our son is here, we live entirely in the meanwhile. We don’t want the present, or its mystery, to end. Each day is absorbing and endlessly significant. Recently, I watched my father’s face as he watched my son’s. Later, we listened as my son learned a new kind of laugh. Each time he looks at us, he sees us more in his own way. Like pages that turn themselves, the meaningful instants follow one another too soon. It’s hard to think of them as stepping stones on the way to anywhere else. ♦

[meadowsland]

BIM THERE, DONE THAT

BY BRIAN BARTH

One practitioner defies the handicaps of building Information modeling for landscape, determined not to remain an exception.

FROM THE AUGUST 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Meghen Quinn, ASLA, has a secret. BIM—an acronym that puts moonbeams in the eyes of architects, but makes some landscape architects cringe—is her software of choice. BIM, shorthand for building information modeling, is the 3-D, data-rich software platform embodied by Revit, a product launched in 2000 by Charles River Software and acquired by Autodesk two years later. By 2012, 70 percent of architecture firms in North America reported using BIM, and in 2016 the American Institute of Architects reported that BIM was used for nearly 100 percent of projects at large firms.

It seems that so few landscape architects use BIM, however, that no one has ever bothered to collect the data. Its reputation in the field is as a clunky, building-centric, overly complex tool that has put up yet another barrier between landscape designers and architects.

Yet Quinn, who merged her San Francisco practice with the Office of Cheryl Barton in January, is all moonbeams. Well, mostly. “I never want to use CAD again,” she says. “Moving to BIM is like entering a 3-D world from a 2-D world…though the limitations for landscape architects are a bit frustrating.” Despite the software’s limitations, Quinn has used Revit from start to finish for her past several projects: a drought-tolerant landscape at the University of San Francisco and a series of rooftop and courtyard gardens at the University of California, Berkeley, among them.

The advantages are legion. Whereas most landscape architects compose their designs in a combination of plan views, sections, and 2-D details, and must create additional 3-D renderings for illustration purposes, with BIM, everything is modeled in 3-D from the start—a huge aid for envisioning how the design will translate from paper to a park or plaza. Every object in the design is linked to its own database, which might include information such as dimensions, weight, carbon footprint, and cost. As a result, chores such as material takeoffs and scheduling, not to mention revisions, are a breeze.

A perspective rendering of a University of California, Berkeley, residence hall courtyard was modeled and rendered within Revit, except for a final Photoshop overlay of plants. Image courtesy of O|CB.

Another innovation: BIM software is typically cloud-based, allowing all members of a design team to work from a single model that updates in real time. On one recent project, Quinn was designing a bench for a patio space. The architects wanted to site an identical bench inside an adjacent glass wall, with the goal of uniting the interior and exterior spaces by drawing the eye along this seamless line. “I don’t see how we could’ve done that if we weren’t both working in the same platform,” Quinn says. “Every little thing I drew had to be fully coordinated with both the architects and the structural engineer. I think we may have given up on some of those inside–outside elements had we not been able to communicate so effectively.”

BIM is more time consuming up front than 2-D drafting, Quinn says, but as the project progresses, that initial investment more than pays for itself. “It is vastly more efficient. You design in 3-D, and then the program creates the 2-D construction documents more or less automatically. With a 2-D program like AutoCAD, you have to constantly export and import information to a program like SketchUp to do three-dimensional studies. You end up redrawing a lot of things, so it’s like you are doing it twice. In Revit, you just model it once, and then you can cut as many sections and elevations as you want, with basically the click of a button.”

As I’ve reported previously (see “The Limits of BIM,” LAM, February 2016), a number of landscape architecture firms have dabbled in BIM over the past decade, but I’ve struggled to find even one that incorporates it into daily work flow. Before I was introduced to Quinn, I’d found three, worldwide, who were using it on at least some of their projects.

This section is cut from a 3-D model of the topography for a terraced planting at the University of San Francisco. Image courtesy of O|CB.

Besides the steep learning curve to master the tool, and the steep price (a Revit subscription costs $2,000 per year), landscape architects’ chief complaint is that BIM programs are ill-designed for modeling complex topographic surfaces. The other big drawback is that the “I” in BIM—information—isn’t available for landscape components the way it is for architectural features. Almost everything in a building, from piping to flooring to office chairs, now has a library of BIM-compatible data available for it, typically supplied by the manufacturer, which adds untold richness to the “model.” BIM enthusiasts often speak of working not in three, but seven, dimensions: time/scheduling (4); cost/estimation (5); sustainability/energy use (6); and life cycle/facilities management (7).

Without the necessary data, however, these capabilities aren’t much help to landscape architects, who deal more in irrigation, drainage, mulch, and shrubs than in drywall and linoleum. But Quinn has found ways to work around these limitations—and she believes that landscape architecture, as a profession, has no choice but to do the same.

Quinn’s initiation into the cult of BIM began in 2011 when she was working for Sasaki Associates in the company’s San Francisco office. The architects in the interdisciplinary firm had been working exclusively in Revit for several years, and were constantly egging on the landscape architects to “take the plunge,” Quinn says. The ribbing aside, the shift in software preferences was opening a gulf between the two professions, even as they worked side by side on the same project. Sasaki architects had always held the landscape components of a project in great esteem, Quinn says, encouraging their counterparts’ input “on how buildings were sited, and the overall look and feel of the project. But when they became fully committed to Revit, that collaboration started to break apart because they were working on another platform.”

The architects in the office literally began to speak another language—clash rendition (preventing constructability errors), data drop (an information deliverable), federated model (multiple BIM models combined into one)—which further alienated their peers. Quinn’s dread only grew when things started going wrong at job sites. In one instance, the waterproofing lines on a new building didn’t match the landforms designed by the landscape architects in the office because the architects hadn’t properly translated the landscape CAD drawings into the Revit model. The landscape architects ended up having to reconfigure the topography on the fly during construction.

“They stopped looking at our grading plans as much, and were modeling sites very rudimentarily on their own,” Quinn recalls. “That’s when the lightbulb started to go off for me. I don’t want architects designing my scope. I want to have a seat at the table and be a collaborative design partner. So I started using Revit.”

Fortunately, she had plenty of architects around to teach her. Landscape architects have long clamored for a SIM (site information modeling) or LIM (landscape information modeling) tool, but Quinn has found she can co-opt the building-based tools of Revit for landscape purposes. The “floor” tool, she says, works just fine for designing the biofiltration planters that are a signature feature in her work. California regulations require on-site treatment of all stormwater on sites above a certain size, which, on tight sites, Quinn likes to take care of in raised beds that hold layers of gravel, engineered soil, mulch, reeds, and other water-loving plants. Different jurisdictions in the state have different requirements for the size of gravel, depth of mulch, and other parameters, which she can quickly alter in a Revit model to suit the circumstances.

A section of a podium courtyard for the Berkeley residence hall illustrates coordination of landscape, architectural, and structural elements in BIM modeling. Image courtesy of O|CB.

“Architecturally, a floor assembly might include things like decking, joists, carpet, some kind of subfloor,” Quinn explains. “The floor feature that comes out of the box with Revit allows you to have all those layers, each with its own dimensions and materiality, and gives you the ability to apply rendering treatments to them. It’s perfect for biofiltration planters—you might have three inches of mulch over 18 inches of soil mix over 12 inches of drain rock, and you can use the floor tool to make those layers. Then you just draw the planter, set the elevations that you want the top of your soil to be, and the program turns it into a 3-D model.”

BIM is most applicable, and easiest to adapt, on landscape projects that are highly integrated with a building, Quinn says. Laying out the hills, dales, and undulating pathways of a park are trickier, but not impossible. Revit’s three-dimensional surface modeling tools are quite elementary, so she recommends modeling complex, organically shaped features in Rhino, a program with files that are readily imported into Revit models.

Quinn reports that BIM data is increasingly available for certain landscape components, such as light fixtures, benches, bollards, and other manufactured site furnishings. For everything else, especially in the plant department, she’s slowly building her own data libraries. “In the early days of Revit, architects did the same thing,” she says. “They would build data sets for whatever they happened to need on a project and then put it out on the Internet for others to use. Then the suppliers jumped on board and started doing it themselves. So I’m convinced that landscape architects can take this on. Sometimes you just have to get creative and improvise.”

This Revit screen capture shows the data held in the model for a planting of giant chainfern (Woodwardia fimbriata). This feature facilitates planting callouts and quantity. Image courtesy of O|CB.

When Sasaki closed its San Francisco office in early 2012, Quinn decided to begin practicing on her own. She figured her BIM chops would be one way to set herself apart and “build a reputation.” They have definitely drawn the attention of the architects who have hired her as a subcontractor in recent years.

Jeffrey Galbraith, an associate architect at Solomon Cordwell Buenz who collaborated with Quinn on the Bancroft Residence Hall, a 775-bed dorm currently under construction at UC Berkeley, says she’s the only landscape architect he’s worked with who is fluent in BIM. One of the more complex features of the site is a pair of terraces off the second and third floors, where landscape features climb over and around an armature of sloped and stepped rooflines and appear as extensions of interior elements, visible through large glazed surfaces.

“It’s a design that couldn’t really be conceived of just in plan, because you’re dealing with at least three elevations, and not all things are orthogonal,” Galbraith says. “In this type of project, where the landscape is a part of the building—which seems to be becoming more and more common—a BIM model allows you to take the design further, to really understand how the landscape features meet and relate to the architectural and structural components, so they can marry and become more seamless.”

One reason that the construction industry has tilted wholesale toward BIM is that building owners find tremendous value in having a detailed model of every inch of their building postconstruction, an asset when carrying out repairs, maintenance, and renovation, which certainly has its merits in the context of landscape, as well. Increasingly, Galbraith says, RFPs require BIM as the project platform. If the landscape architect works only in CAD, this means the project prime must translate the landscape drawings to the model—not a position either party wants to be in.

Galbraith is surprised that Autodesk hasn’t made more of an effort to cater to landscape architects, given that a central promise of BIM is improved coordination among trades. Plumbing, electrical, mechanical, and structural engineers have all made the switch, he says, noting that civil engineers are the one other holdout. Quinn once contacted Autodesk to offer herself as a guinea pig should the company want to work on any new landscape-oriented BIM tools, an offer it declined. I’ve spoken with other landscape architects who were similarly rebuffed by the company.

Seeking answers, I requested an interview with an Autodesk representative. The company demurred, offering only written responses to my questions instead. Some answers were quite blunt: “What it comes down to is a willingness of landscape architects to embrace disruption and creatively engage with new technologies and work flows.” Others, more of an olive branch: “Landscape architects who want more services or plug-ins for Revit should let us know what they need, and we will explore what the art of the possible is.”

Quinn says she’s never come up against a Revit challenge that she couldn’t resolve by studying the many online forums and tutorials for the BIM community. Autodesk offers two free tutorials on using Revit in landscape architecture, and landarchbim.com offers a 33-part video series on the subject for $230. The Autodesk representative also pointed me to the company’s Site Designer Extension plug-in (previously known as Siteworks), which Quinn says that, despite being “trashed in customer reviews…bridges the gap in Revit’s site design deficiencies by adding more parametric and algorithmic modeling capability to the topographic features. It shows that Autodesk is taking a step in the right direction and investing in site design—but there is a long way to go.”

She’s not complaining, though. Success is the best revenge. In Quinn’s case, she’s too busy figuring out how to make LIM out of BIM to be annoyed by architecture’s dominance with the software industry. “I think it is paramount that landscape architects take this on. Otherwise we’re going to be relegated to planting and irrigation, and that’s not the only scope that I am interested in having.”

Brian Barth is a Toronto-based freelance writer with a background in landscape design and urban planning.

from Landscape Architecture Magazine https://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2017/08/15/bim-there-done-that/