A building is the biggest hard-disk ever!

Usage Stage of Design
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Once a piece of architecture; say a building, is constructed. It would be occupied by humans and put to use.

One way of looking at how buildings are put to use; is to look at them as information sponges. That means, as activities happen in there; the building is silently recording what is going on; and depositing some clue in the mind of the occupants.

Of course, the term recording is just a metaphor. What I mean here; is that the spaces end up as obedient servants, quite ready to allow any activity to happen in them. Again, I am personifying spaces here – as if they were human servants.

This “recording” is never perfect. The spaces leave an impact in the minds of the occupants involved in that particular activity. Those minds rarely would have photographic memory. But they will loosely store an association between the activity that had happened and the space where it happened.

Let me give an example: Let’s say you came back from a tour of Russia; and now you are in your living room — and showing the Russian Dolls that you had purchased. Say; you had a big, interesting discussion in that living room, as you kept those Russian Dolls in a shelf of that living room. This is where a mind-association happens between your memory and the space.

There is a possibility that later on, when you fidget with the same Russian Dolls, you may not only remember your visit to Russia; but also that interesting conversation that may have happened.

Of course; such memory triggers do not happen all the time – and as stated before; these memories will not be perfect. But in a nice metaphorical sense, spaces end up as sponges for storing your information.

What is fascinating is that the very same space, would do quite similar associations with each and every occupant. It is not that once it aids the memories of one person, it cannot do for other. Obviously it can do this for each and every occupant!

It is because of this I claim that a building is the biggest hard-disk ever!

Which brings us to an interesting question: If modelling of architecture has to cover such usage phase too, how would be the modelling that would need to capture all such pieces of memories?

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Hmmm. Just off the cuff, thinking aloud,
If the building is the biggest hard disk ever (why biggest🤔), what happens when and if we reboot? Can we infuse afresh a new set of associations and memories? Yes and no. Yes because we can re-do, renovate, re- purpose and re-hash. No, because the hard disk is each user’s brain (mind). Both, because it’s a balance between the two.
Thoughts?

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Ah, that’s the problem with metaphors and analogies. You stretch it far; and it surely would break. The point is to make cognitive sense before it breaks.

BTW, hard-disks do not get rebooted. It is the computer in the hard-disk that gets booted or rebooted.

I am pointing out this nature of humongous storage capabilities of buildings only to facilitate conversations on how to do the abstract modelling of them. You see, computer scientists who talk about big-data often never realize that we have always been dealing with big-data. Just that the big-data did not come into our lives the way a computer and its data comes into our lives.

In a computer and it’s data – the data lives outside of us humans, and inside a box. But in case of real world data that gets accumulated, the data gets accumulated all around us; with we able to access practically any part of it at a short notice.

Even if you discount the evocative reference to memories in the brain; the sheer fact that a space can allow us to actually keep physical things itself is a data-storage activity. And there is a huge lot that can get stored in the spaces of a building

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Yep, point well taken. The hard disk gets re-formatted, rather.