What computers were not meant to do
"But in running our institutions we disregard our tools because we do not recognise what they really are. So, we use computers to process data, as if data had a right to be processed, and as if processed data were necessarily digestible and nutritious to the institution, and carry on with the incantations like so many latter-day alchemists."
- Stafford Beer, 'Designing Freedom'
The cyberneticist Stafford Beer wrote these lines in his typical humorous style way back in the 1970s.
Despite Beer's best efforts, in the years since the publication of his essays and with the tremendous increase in the processing power, storage capacity and affordability of modern computers, this obsession with data has also kept on increasing till it reached the ludicrous levels that we see today when the act of collecting of vast amounts of data itself justifies the purpose for collecting vast amounts of data.
A particularly tragic situation is one which is quite typical in the offices of the urban development sector (the field which I am most familiar with) and involves highly educated professionals spending tens of person-hours preparing graphic-heavy power-point presentations. Nothing against power-point at all ! It is a great software. The problem lies in this undue importance that professionals in the development sector feel obligated to attach to visual presentations and the time and effort they end up dedicating to the task.
Instead of making a clear presentation of the activities being undertaken by the organisation (the main purpose of a software like power-point), the making of the presentation itself becomes a big chunk of the activities being performed by the organisation.
And these files are heavy ! Tens of mega-bytes just for making the whole thing cluttered with images, data visualisation charts, animations etc.
The same philosophy extends to online dash-boards and cluttered charts that urban planning graduate students in India increasingly make for their project presentations.
Whether by design or not, the only effect such presentations have is to visually overwhelm and confuse the viewer, and not bring clarity to the topic being discussed.
We have all seen those bloated power-point files...no need to share examples of those eye-sores here.
Now let's see instead the power of a simple text file containing a script, and with a size of only 3 kilobytes.
The 3 kb text file
The following screen-shot is of a program I wrote for automating the technical steps of the slum-proofing vertical of Jaga Mission - the landmark slum land titling and upgrading initiative of the Government of Odisha.
I will explain the slum-proofing vertical in detail in another blog. In this one I will just outline the structure of the program.
The process involved certain very concrete technical steps - (a) Identify the location of existing slums (b) identify vacant government land parcels near the existing slums (c) check them for suitability (d) generate map outputs for further visual analysis and verification.
The program automates that planning process by performing the following steps -
1) selects a user-designated city from the list of total cities;
2) draws buffers of user-designated radius length around the centroid of each slum;
3) clips suitable land parcels (i.e. filters out categories such as waterbodies, ponds, tanks, forests etc) that fall within the buffer from the cadastral map layer containing vacant land parcels owned by the government;
4) calculates the total vacant land available and approximate number of households that could be accommodated;
5) outputs a report stating the total vacant land available and total residential plots that could be created on that land assuming a plot size of 30 sqm and 60 percent land coverage by residential plots.
6) outputs vector maps of the vacant land parcels for further visual scrutiny and human analysis
7) outputs maps in pdf format for a quick look by team members unfamiliar with GIS and for printing out.
It took a few seconds for this process to be completed for a city that contained about 40 slums.
If the user would like to change the city or alter the buffer distance (for example, if suitable land is not available within the buffer of the designated radius length), it can be easily done by just typing the desired inputs in the prompt asking for the city code and the buffer radius.
Considering the fact the the Mission involves 115 cities and 2919 slums, this program shortens the analytical process by orders of magnitude and allows time to be devoted to study the outputs, have discussions, refine the overall strategy and assess the probability of effective implementation.
And most importantly, writing such programs is an extremely interesting, fun and creative process.
Have fun doing creative work and automate the rest...what could be more delightful than that ??
The size of the text file that contains this program and undertakes all these tasks in a matter of seconds is 3 kilobytes.
Is it so hard to see which one is really our friend and ally ??
To part 2...
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