Dead Ends: Legacy

Welcome to Dead Ends, a monthly podcast about how the world around us is designed and how it got that way. And mostly. And isn't that interesting? I'm one half of your hosts, Sarah Drummond, and I'm the other half. Lou Downe and this is the Dead Ends podcast. We hope you enjoy the show. So a couple of weeks ago we were sanding our floors.

00:00:31:13 - 00:01:01:12

Lou

A little insight into our exciting lives. And, we found what can only be described as a time capsule or should I say a time capsule. because that was what was written on the envelope. And, the envelope was very suspicious. It basically just had that written on the front. And then inside was a note that said, this has been placed under the floor by, Caroline and Theresa, aged 12 and nine and the date and 1989.

00:01:01:14 - 00:01:25:19

Lou

And it also said, very intriguingly, that we have placed some items. And the only item we found was a interview with none other than a very young Rick Astley. and a photograph of him on the front. Do we get physically Rick Rhodes? yeah, we did. And also we got physically Rick rode before Rickrolling was even a thing before the internet by Theresa.

00:01:25:19 - 00:01:47:01

Lou/Sarah

And what were the names again? Caroline, aged 12 and nine, also with an exclamation mark. Why was it 1989, 1989? How long ago? That's like 34 years ago. That's a yes. So if there is a Theresa and Caroline out there somewhere and we won't give away our location, but the south east of England. Yeah. Right now you're around about the early to mid 40s.

00:01:47:01 - 00:02:08:18

Lou

And you were right, Rick Astley fans in the 80s. Yeah. Like really big Rick Astley fans. We found your time capsule. Yeah, we found it. And also Rick, I don't know if you remember giving this interview, but you did, give some interesting details about the color of your duvet and the type of tea that you really like, and the fact that he used to be the tea boy for, Pete Waterman.

00:02:08:20 - 00:02:48:13

Lou

yeah. Which is I didn't know. I know what you learn every day in this podcast. Yeah. You do, they go. There's an extra fact for you. We should tweet Rick Astley that he has physically recovered us from the past, from a nine and 11 year old from the past. And, long story short, it got us thinking about the preservation of knowledge and legacy, which is a big issue when it comes to designing and delivering services, and also how important context is, because if we did not have that context, I think we probably would have assumed that we were being Rick rolled from the past if we didn't know the ages of the

00:02:48:13 - 00:03:08:00

Lou

people who had buried this particular photograph of Rick Astley, and that it was two pre-teen girls who were just really into a particular celebrity, we would have been none the wiser. this is a very rambling story that has got us thinking about legacy and how that works. I went and did some real geeking out. You call it Drummond vision, don't you?

00:03:08:00 - 00:03:35:19

Sarah

Yeah. Single focus. I don't think I can I don't know if I'm plagiarizing the song Tunnel Vision, but you can sing it I can't Drummond. Drummond vision down Drummond I went old Drummond vision on time Capsules and did a lot of reading up into where they come from. And like we've got a really kind of interesting history of capturing human life and doing really weird things about it for, you know, preserving our legacies essentially, and a lot of egotism, actually, that comes with creating time capsules.

00:03:36:00 - 00:04:02:02

Sarah

And did you know, Lou, that there is a register of the International Time Capsule Society? I did not know that, Sarah. You know it. No. Estimates that there are between 10,000 and 15,000 time capsules worldwide. How do you even estimate that? Well, I guess people I mean, we'll get onto this. There's a lot of egotism, probably in creating a time capsule of some kind of legacy of something that you cared about.

00:04:02:02 - 00:04:21:01

Sarah

So I guess people want to register that maybe. Yeah. I mean, anything that we care about, I guess we'll make a list of it, I suppose. So if we get this right, an estimated 95% of time capsules, are lost track of by the fifth anniversary of the burial. Well, I mean, it seems like quite a short period of time for something that's supposed to be buried for, like, well, hundreds of years.

00:04:21:01 - 00:04:52:09

Sarah

Right? It's really round it. Well, we'll get to this because some of them actually are buried with the intention of thousands of years of revival of them. but when I started looking into different time capsules and one of my favorite examples I'd actually come across because a friend of mine who, has been looking after the kind of flicker foundation in the future of like, the image set had told me about, the golden discs, which were, I guess, an initiative set up by, NASA that were placed on this kind of were kind of like a time capsule mounted on to Voyager one and two, intended to communicate our story, of

00:04:52:09 - 00:05:16:22

Sarah

the worlds to extra terrestrials. and the Golden record was actually an upgrade to an earlier sort of attempt at creating a space spatial, a spatial and spatial, time capsule, which was called the pioneer plaques. And there were a pair of these kind of gold anodized aluminum plaques were placed on board the 1972 pioneer ten and 1973 pioneer 11 aircraft, featuring this kind of pictorial message.

00:05:16:24 - 00:05:41:16

Sarah

and to try and communicate. Yeah, what our life was in case they were intercepted by intelligent had to be intelligent extra terrestrial life. and I thought what was really cool actually is Carl Sagan, who's like an American astronomer and planetary scientist who was behind some of this initiative and part of it, his wife, Linda Schlozman Sagan, who was a con artist at the time, actually etched an illustration onto them of a nude man and woman with an indication of the time in the creation of our civilization.

00:05:41:16 - 00:06:04:01

Sarah

So that was what we sent out into space. so it was a kind of the first prototype of doing this. But the Voyager golden discs, are carried on this like phonograph records. And there are 12 inch gold plated copper disc containing, like sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, mounted onto Voyager one and 2 in 1977.

00:06:04:01 - 00:06:37:21

Sarah

And the idea was that the two copies of the record would serve as time capsules and transmit much more information about life on Earth should it, or aliens or whatever is living out there and find it. And it was created by this team of scientists and artists and writers led by Carl. and I'll talk a little bit later on, actually, cause I think it's really interesting about how they came to decide what went on to this sort of time capsule, but they contain 115 analog encoded images, including photographs of humans, animals and landscapes from around the world, as well as scientific diagrams and different maps.

00:06:37:23 - 00:07:02:19

Sarah

But it also includes, like a variety of natural sounds such as thunder, wind and bird calls, as well as music from different cultures ranging from classical to folk to rock. So somewhere out there are some gold discs spinning around in outer space, waiting to be intercepted by some aliens. Amazing. I mean, assumedly also intelligent aliens that are in any way able to understand all of that stuff, right?

00:07:02:19 - 00:07:20:01

Lou

Like collectively, that is overwhelming for human to even think about that, like plethora of random shit in this in space, there's a lot of shit in space. Basically, right now there is literal shit in space, and now there's just a golden disk full of other random shit. Well, it's pouring random stuff, right? Sorry, sorry. Golden disc. Yeah. No.

00:07:20:01 - 00:07:41:12

Sarah

It's important stuff, but I guess, I mean, that's a format of time capsules in some way. For a very long time as humans, we've been trying to make sure that we capture the history of who we are and what we've been up to and make it available for other people to find. and I try to start looking for the history of what the first time capsule actually was or is, because that's sort of a more modern, version.

00:07:41:14 - 00:08:01:05

Sarah

And I'll tell you some a bit about the history of that. And I want to say no, by no means is this a wholly comprehensive, entirely accurate. That was quite factual version of the history of Time Capsules, because it's quite debatable about actually what a time capsule actually is and where it came from. and there's of course different interpretations of what we mean by Time capsule.

00:08:01:05 - 00:08:21:09

Sarah

So some are very deliberate and some are accidental captures of time. So if you take like Pompeii and sort of what happened in Pompeii and people being literally buried alive in the moment of what they were doing, and, you know, discoveries that we've made in places like ancient Egypt and lots of other indigenous lands, we could consider a lot of that as, as a capsule of time.

00:08:21:11 - 00:08:55:08

Sarah

But I'm going to talk a little bit more about the deliberate time capsules. So just to kind of broaden our understanding of this, but some say that the oldest known time capsule is the Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, a time capsule that can be found in a cornerstone of the Massachusetts State House. And supposedly this time capsule, which was buried in around 1795, is the oldest time capsule in the United States and possibly the world in a time capsule was first removed from the location where it was buried in 1855, and at the time the contents of it were were very, very, what's the right word?

00:08:55:11 - 00:09:18:16

Lou

Unwell? well, what was inside of it? Oh, I don't mean anything living. Oh, God. Okay. I just mean they weren't in very good state conditions, right? Yeah. Okay. Don't worry. There was nothing buried alive. This is gone dark. Anyway, the time capsule was first removed from the location where it was buried at 1855. And at the time, the contents of the time capsule, were not in a great condition.

00:09:18:16 - 00:09:33:13

Sarah

So they were documented and cleaned. They put some other items in. So it was kind of like, an angel dated and ideal time capsule. Okay. To add some more in, and it was put back in, and the second time it was removed from its burial site was in 2014 when it was found accidentally, actually by some builders.

00:09:33:15 - 00:09:57:01

Sarah

So that, some say, is the first deliberate kind of time capsule. In a way, I think it's very debatable. It's not pretty ad hoc, to be honest. I just kept digging it up and adding other stuff to it, but fine. Okay, fine. But I mean, you could there's so many on this list, this register of of time capsules, you know, there's ones that were from, more 1700s in Burgos, Spain.

00:09:57:03 - 00:10:15:18

Sarah

the Cathedral of Burgo de Ozma has one. I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on. So you can view loads of these time capsules. Basically, the International Time Capsule Society was created in 1990 to maintain a global database of all known time capsules. I mean, a time capsule of time capsule is super meta.

00:10:15:21 - 00:10:40:11

Sarah

It's amazing. I'm really kicked out in this, and the not forgotten Digital Preservation library maintains a current map and register of domestic and commercial time capsules, and one of the most famous time capsules. because it was one of the first, I guess, really intentional sense to create what we might consider as a time capsule was by Doctor Jacob Stowell, who went on to be dubbed the father of the modern time capsule, and he was the founder.

00:10:40:11 - 00:11:01:15

Lou

Get this name amazing of the Oglethorpe Atlanta crypt of civilization. Okay, keep it modest. Crypt of civilization. There's a lot of egotism in this podcast today. and apparently it was this sort of first successful attempt to bury a record for any future inhabitants. And, you know, this this thought was concept of what he was doing with the crypt.

00:11:01:17 - 00:11:31:16

Sarah

He socialized it quite a lot, probably trying to get more money for it and help build it. And the idea sort of caught on for a few of the people at the time. and apparently the actual term time capsule. So, so apparently the actual term time capsule was coined by somebody called George E Pendry, who was a PR consultant for Westinghouse Electric Company, to describe the company's exhibit for the new York World's Fair in 1939.

00:11:31:18 - 00:11:49:12

Sarah

He was going to call what was essentially became his time capsule, the time bomb. And I see why that didn't have great optics. It did not good optics ago. And Doctor Jablow and here come on to talk about he's a sort of like studied a lot of this history, told ABC orange late Night Live in 1939.

00:11:49:12 - 00:12:20:05

Sarah

That probably wouldn't have gone down too well. Yeah. Not great timing for time bombs. So Yobel was working around the same sort of similar timescales as, the Westinghouse Electric Company's time bomb time capsule. but Thoreau's concept for the crypt came about because, Jacobs was struck by the death of information on the ancient civilizations. And in November 1936, in Scientific American Magazine, he explained at length an idea for preserving contemporary records for posterity.

00:12:20:07 - 00:12:40:20

Sarah

So Jacobs wrote of a unique plan to present, running story of Life and customs to show the manner of life in 1936, as well as the accumulated knowledge of mankind up until that time. So his plan was essentially to kind of preserve consciously for the first time in history, a thorough record of civilization and watch, in which he called a crypt.

00:12:40:22 - 00:12:57:24

Sarah

Now the crypt was located under Phoebe Hurst Hall. It's a room that's 20ft long, ten feet high and ten feet wide. so that's kind of it's quite big, right? Like it's not a time capsule, as you might imagine it, but conceptually, it's a time capsule, but it's more a lot of stuff in there. Well, he did get a lot of stuff in there.

00:12:57:24 - 00:13:24:00

Lou

I mean, humankind, there's a lot to civilization, too. It's like a big yellow storage for humanity. Sorry. Other storage facilities are available. Yeah. So the crystal, the crystal, the crypt resting on bedrock with two feet of stone above it is lined with porcelain enamel plates embedded in pitch, and it's sealed with a great stainless steel door welded in place.

00:13:24:02 - 00:13:55:24

Sarah

So this kind of crypt effectively launched, you know, as we've we've sort of mentioned the modern time capsule movement in 1936. And Thermal Jacobs had been inspired by the Egyptian tomb openings in the 1920s and argued that because 6177 years had passed since the establishment of the Egyptian calendar, his own crypt should be opened six days in 177 years in the future, and Jacob's rationale suggests the importance of narrative in her handling of deep time.

00:13:55:24 - 00:14:21:10

Sarah

Specifically, I need to impose a sort of quantifiable beginning, middle and end. It becomes a story with ourselves perpetually at center. And I love the fact that time capsules kind of came about because there was this dearth of historical knowledge that we found really, really confusing. And so we went, well, okay, the future of humanity will just sort of shout out and we'll like put it in a little box underground and, and make it really, really easy for you.

00:14:21:12 - 00:14:38:19

Sarah

Like there's this kind of, there's something quite caring about largely. Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm making jokes about it being quite an egotistical venture as well. And we will talk about one of those in a second. But yeah, I think there's actually a lot of care, attention to being like, how do we preserve what we know and and share it with the future?

00:14:38:19 - 00:15:02:22

Sarah

So the crypt, along with the 1939 World Fairs, Westinghouse capsule, are probably two of the best known capsules of the pre-war era, and both contain some similar stuff. So the types of things that we put in them were articles selected by the then National Bureau of Standards, among other things. Found in the crypt were seed samples, dental floss.

00:15:02:24 - 00:15:27:13

Sarah

That's important. I'm not finished yet. Okay, a fake bird, fake. Why was it not a real bird? Six Artie Shaw recordings A Lionel model train and a doll, of course, is other things, but I'm telling you, some of the slightly older things. So I read a bit more about this in an article in The Atlantic, and they describe this sort of encapsulated objects as memento mori.

00:15:27:15 - 00:15:51:08

Sarah

and they ask this really good question about the technologies used to then experience them. So if we're going to open these things in such a long, you know, period of time in the future, won't they, to kind of disappear. And I thought was really interesting that this article in The Atlantic went on to describe actually that inside the Westinghouse capsule, it includes instructions on how to build a microfilm viewer on a motion picture projector.

00:15:51:10 - 00:16:12:01

Sarah

And even better, actually, the Cripps language integrator included a hand powered device designed to teach 1500 words of basic English using the Nickelodeon principle. Now, how it actually works is something of a bit of a mystery. Now, already, because the papers detailing its operation have been lost to time. But let's just move beyond the issue of that. You can't really prototype your way through it.

00:16:12:01 - 00:16:33:00

Sarah

You're going to lock it down and not open it for 6000 years. but I really like this line in the Atlantic article that said, when objects become disassociated from their attending technologies, we lose entire worlds. And so I just really kind of loved this idea about including ways for us to actually be able to access the information.

00:16:33:00 - 00:16:55:11

Sarah

That is a kind of legacy in itself. I just want to tell you, like one last little thing about the Westinghouse stuff. So there's a plaque on the capsule that some of the Westinghouse contacts. So they have 22,000 pages of microfilm, 15 minutes of newsreel, an alarm clock, bifocals. And believe it or not, carrots cause they age so well.

00:16:55:13 - 00:17:29:08

Lou

How long was it supposed to be buried underground? For? A very long time. Yeah. Okay, so jokes aside, of time capsules, I think we have to be quite critical of them in a way. So even though. And carrots, even though it had carrots, which is clearly redeeming feature for anything. Yeah. Well it had carrots, but the Westinghouse time capsule didn't have the point of view of any woman in its arms and in fact, famously rose Arnold Powell, who we now remember for our efforts to have Susan be Anthony represented on Mount Rushmore, if you know a bit about that story, sent a telegram to the Westinghouse offices in New York calling attention to a

00:17:29:08 - 00:17:53:02

Sarah

press release that publicized the messages of renown men enclosed in the capsule. And I quote, men and women together produced our civilization, wrote Powell, who encouraged Westinghouse to request a statement from the woman suffrage activist Carrie Chapman Catt. Unfortunately, there was little to kind of be done in that sense. Catt was recovering from an automobile accident, so she couldn't see who wrote the letter, and the capsule was sealed and the deposit ceremony was to take place in three days.

00:17:53:02 - 00:18:15:07

Sarah

So we never actually really got that, that view in it. But I think what this tells us is actually we can there's some issues, I guess, with time capsules and people have over the course of history, taken issue with them. And I think, you know, I've made a few jokes already about egotism, but historically many of these kinds of time capsules were created by people with some form of privilege, power, money and or time.

00:18:15:08 - 00:18:37:18

Sarah

And we have to kind of look back, actually, when we think about these strings of time with some criticality, actually, about who made the decisions about what to put in it. And actually, we know for a fact at some really purposely excluded being inclusive and diverse in what they represented. And according to a researcher called Doctor Javelin, one of the first people to create a time vessel.

00:18:37:20 - 00:19:16:17

Sarah

So another person who was the first time capsule, that's why I said this history is not, you know, fully 100% accurate because it's this difference of opinion around this, with Chicago photographer Charles Mosher, who wrote the sadly was an early advocate for eugenics. So Moscow created, what he called a memorial safe kind of time vessel for the American Centennial Exposition in 1876, celebrating 100 years since the country's signing of the Declaration of Independence and apparently in his book Remembrance of Things Present to You, I then writes that Moscow appears to have had fears about the contamination of Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock.

00:19:16:23 - 00:19:49:15

Sarah

To memorialize that stock, moisture filled a safe with some 10,000 portraits of notable Chicagoans and their wives, as well as literature on pro generate schools and colleges and more so you could say, invoked eugenic pseudoscience in vaguely expressed hopes that the healthy could be encouraged to reproduce, and the unfit, discouraged doctor who had been reported. And he writes that Marshall really gave physical form to his racial visions, rendering his eugenicist utopia concrete through the vessel because he chose not to include different people and he was racist.

00:19:49:15 - 00:20:09:21

Sarah

So he had only white people present in this time capsule, which was obviously not a true representation of the fact of people living in that area at the time. So time capsules and time vessels and time bombs and whatever you want to call them are, quite problematic actually, as a concept. And I don't want to kind of completely put a downer on time capsules.

00:20:09:21 - 00:20:33:10

Sarah

But on the flip side, there's positives to them as well. And there's been lots of really great examples, actually, of time capsules that really were kind of buried underground to instill a sense of duty to future generations. And actually the participation of taking part in that is about, I guess, engendering long term thinking and a sense of responsibility to future generations by thinking about future.

00:20:33:10 - 00:20:56:24

Sarah

So I think that the main critique, really, according to Time Capsule historian William Jarvis, is that most intentional time capsules usually do not provide much useful historical information, so they're typically filled with useless junk, as he puts it, like carrots. Well, I mean, they were useful at the time. At least this maybe there's some kind of interesting mold that we can ascertain in the future.

00:20:56:24 - 00:21:24:09

Sarah

And that was an experiment in itself. But, you know, useless junk, often quite new and pristine, in condition that tells very little about the people of the time. And many time capsules today contain only artifacts of of limited value to future historians. And historians suggest that items which describe the daily lives of the people who created them, such as personal notes, pictures, videos, and documents, would greatly increase the value of the time capsule to future historians.

00:21:24:11 - 00:21:47:20

Sarah

And I really like this kind of quote from the article that said. But time capsules go a step further by insisting upon the actual atoms, rather than just the words used to describe them. They celebrate the talismanic quality of their objects packaged to deliver the vicarious experience of having occupied a particular cultural moment. The belief that these time bound materials of timelessness speak for themselves.

00:21:47:22 - 00:22:11:16

Sarah

But it's the context that matters, and this is precisely what slips away with the objects inside it. Yeah, and this is why, actually, our time capsule is kind of honest in a way. You know, it's got the names of the people who wrote it. it's got their ages. It's got enthusiastic bubble writing written in a highlighter. It's in a little kind of plastic gift bag.

00:22:11:18 - 00:22:34:05

Lou

Like there's so much context around that photograph of Rick Astley that actually helps you to understand that these were kind of like two pre-teen girls who were kind of into the, you know, the celebrity at the time. and this, this kind of problem of being honest and documenting stuff intentionally is precisely why archeologists love a rubbish heap.

00:22:34:05 - 00:23:01:05

Lou

Right? You know, middens are the thing that archeologists love thinking about in because they are really honest depictions of what we were into and eating and throwing away at the time, everything from crockery to shoes and combs and everything else in between. And, you know, in a sense they give a much more honest documentation of what we were doing and, and how our lives were lived at the time.

00:23:01:09 - 00:23:23:10

Sarah

And I think it's a really good example of that. Sometimes we document things that are not important, that we think are like carrots, and sometimes we don't document the things that actually are important, like our social relationships and how we eat and what we think and what we believe and what our relationships are with each other. And we're quite bad at knowing what that information is in advance.

00:23:23:10 - 00:23:48:19

Lou

So what you were saying got me thinking about something I read in the news recently about an unexploded bomb being found in Plymouth in someone's garden, and it was a few months ago, but, I think it was about 500 kilogram bomb was basically discovered in the garden of someone's house in Plymouth. And obviously, you know, if you find a bomb in someone's garden, it's a big deal.

00:23:48:19 - 00:24:08:21

Lou

Right? But this was an unexploded Second World War bomb. And obviously, you know, anyone who knows anything about Plymouth will know that Plymouth was quite heavily bombed in the Second World War. But what was really interesting about this story, for me, was the fact that it was just really striking that this bomb had been discovered so many years later.

00:24:08:21 - 00:24:33:04

Lou

You know, I think it was dropped probably in, I think the last time Plymouth was bombed was July 1940. So nobody who was around at the time of the manufacture of that bomb would still be alive. Really today. and so the people who were, you know, disarming that bomb from the Ministry of Defense, I assume, would have no idea really how that bomb was manufactured, unless, of course, there's documentation.

00:24:33:04 - 00:24:58:24

Lou

And I would imagine there probably isn't a lot of documentation, actually, about how, you know, kind of Second World War bombs work because that's, you know, not really the kind of thing you want to give to your enemy in war. So, you know, how do you decent disarm a bomb that you don't necessarily know how it works. So how do we manage that kind of knowledge that people need to know about something in the future when that thing never really gets documented?

00:24:58:24 - 00:25:18:15

Lou

And you know, this question about time capsules is a really good one. But, you know, we've just talked about the fact that actually they're really bad ways of documenting things because we just don't know what's going to be important in the future. Yeah, it's really interesting. I think this effort that goes into the preservation of knowledge and I guess the kind of concept of knowledge management.

00:25:18:15 - 00:25:41:07

Sarah

Right. But also the effort that goes into finding out how things work from the past as well. I was reading this is just a real nerding out moment now, but I was actually reading a article, by Chad Conrad, who is the archive specialist in the Manuscript Division at the US Library of Congress, and his colleague, senior archive specialist Kathleen O'Neill.

00:25:41:07 - 00:26:00:05

Sarah

And they've been working together on a project called Born Digital Access. Now. And they've been talking kind of quite publicly about the project, whose central aim is to research and understand the various file formats in the library's manuscript division collections that are containing what we call born digital materials. So it's not like old papers in a box that have come in.

00:26:00:06 - 00:26:29:18

Sarah

It's just stuff on sticks and floppy disks and things like this. And Chad's settings. Article when I process born digital collections, the part that I enjoy the most is trying to determine the file format of an unknown file, and finding the right tool for accessing files of this type. And he kind of told a story where they were processing, the Nina, the feather off papers, who, was a scientist and did some kind of incredible work, as you know, the last 50, 60 years.

00:26:29:20 - 00:27:00:12

Sarah

And he came across these files called DRA files, and they're the kind of Mac based files. And they had to load up old Macintosh computers and browsers and find old versions of Apple Works and Claris Works. So for any old Mac users out there, you might recognize some of these software names and really carefully handle these files so they could kind of access even like things and notes like track changes and stuff, because there's a lot of really interesting bits inside the files that they want to be able to access as well.

00:27:00:12 - 00:27:38:11

Lou

So there's a huge amount that must go into the preservation of all kinds of, technology and technology being knowledge. Right? Yeah, absolutely. It's funny that, story really reminds me of when I used to work at Tate and when we would buy an artwork into the collection, particularly if it was a digital artwork or it was made out of some, you know, kind of strange materials, we had to request basically exactly that, you know, the software that it was created with so that it could be maintained or displayed in the right way, and often quite, you know, technical documentation really about that particular artwork and how it should be displayed.

00:27:38:11 - 00:28:20:01

Lou

So it's really interesting that that is, still going on in an archival practice, but you had a really interesting story that you told me that builds on this about Moroni Barrels. Oh, I mean, I always have a story about food, right? yeah. There was a really interesting thing I was reading recently about a, Japanese soy sauce manufacturer who had to replace one of their marami barrels, and marami barrels are basically gigantic, fermentation vats where basically soy sauce, water, salt, and various, you know, kind of enzymes that are collected from the air, you know, go into basically the fermentation, creation of soy sauce.

00:28:20:01 - 00:28:42:04

Lou

And they last for hundreds of years. You know, these barrels are industrially built. but this company had to replace one of their barrels. And the company that replaced this barrel for them had not made a barrel for 50 years. And I was just struck by the comparison between that and the the Plymouth bomb that had to be, discharged.

00:28:42:04 - 00:29:03:10

Lou

You know, all those years later, how on earth do you make a marami barrel 50 years later, when the last one you made was long enough ago, that probably it's a totally different person? And also, how do you manage to keep a company going for 50 years? That hasn't sold anything. It was completely mind blown by that whole story.

00:29:03:15 - 00:29:25:13

Lou

I mean, they must have literally had to get someone out of retirement to come and advise them how to make this marami barrel. And it's really hard not to see the comparison between getting someone out of retirement to come and make a marami barrel for you, and what many organizations have to do of getting people out of retirement often to come and fix their legacy.

00:29:25:13 - 00:29:51:04

Lou

IT systems, which no one remembers how to use anymore, or are written in a code that is no longer used by anyone other than this one particular person who is now probably paid absolutely astronomical fees to come and fix that particular thing. And I'm sure there are many people listening to this who will empathize with this. But I can think of many, many cases where I've seen this happening.

00:29:51:06 - 00:30:13:18

Lou

Say it's new here. Time for a show ad break. When we're not podcasting, we run the school, look at services that helps people and organizations learn how to design and deliver great services. We teach courses on service design, how to get by and for your work, and what makes a good and a bad service. So if you want to know more about that and to sign up to one of our courses, check out the services.

00:30:13:20 - 00:30:32:14

Sarah

But we've all become like so familiar with the term legacy it. And I think there's there's lots of interpretations of what it might mean. And I'm not here to gave like a specific this is exactly what legacy it is. But I think it's now become a kind of common phrase for most people working in and around organizations in, I guess, sort of it.

00:30:32:16 - 00:30:56:16

Sarah

But what we might actually refer to as design and digital, as we seek ways to talk about working live in the open and agile, but having to interface with systems that were commissioned or built a while ago and are no longer fit for purpose, or the best case scenario could be fit for purpose. But the organizations don't really have an easy ability to adapt, or change them.

00:30:56:18 - 00:31:20:09

Sarah

some people talk about it becoming incompatible with new technologies, so it loses its ability to sort of keep up with the pace of development of other systems, because a lot of our products and services in a digital way are so tightly coupled that they need to be kind of able to integrate with one another. and I was just when I was actually looking to find out, you know, how other people describe legacy it.

00:31:20:14 - 00:31:41:20

Sarah

What's the definition of it? I just went onto your, your, your standard Google and wiki, you know, entry. And there was just this one little example, you know, the little image you always get wiki and it's like a little case study of where that thing actually applies. And the example they actually had was the US Navy Food Service Management system that up until 2011 were still using mS-DOS.

00:31:41:20 - 00:32:05:17

Sarah

And if you've never seen mS-DOS before, I think cast your mind back to sort of science fiction films around about the 1960s or 70s, where it was a little cursor and just like green text on a black screen, and you use essentially like arrow keys and keyboards to, you know, there's no interface, basically. So we have been using, really outdated technology or stuff that's become frozen in time.

00:32:05:19 - 00:32:26:00

Lou

I think this way of operating our technology feels like it has these kinds of comparisons to the time capsule era, and a sense that something has made a certain point in time. But without much regard for how that will be continuously used in the future. You know, how will kind of preserve the knowledge to be able to make that thing useful as time goes on?

00:32:26:02 - 00:32:51:09

Sarah

And, you know, there's lots of reasons why legacy technology is really bad for business. We often talk actually about the hidden cost of legacy technology. You know, they one keep you stuck in the past. So if you've got this big system that you've either built or most of the time you've procured end to operate parts of your business, or service, if you can't change that, you are stuck with that thing.

00:32:51:09 - 00:33:11:14

Sarah

So that makes you, I guess, a bit uncompetitive or unable to keep up with the needs of your users or the people needing to use your service. It gives you, you know, hinders your customer experience. as I mentioned, you can't really integrate with stuff. As other technology changes, you also become vulnerable to attacks in different ways.

00:33:11:14 - 00:33:33:16

Sarah

You know, like cybersecurity attacks and things like this. And actually, a lot of your stuff ends up just becoming really clunky and staff develop workflows around as well. I mean, I could go on and on and on, but legacy it is bad, is really bad. And the Royal Bank of Scotland actually are an example of a company that probably learned this lesson the really hard way.

00:33:33:18 - 00:33:58:14

Sarah

legacy systems at the bank failed for several days in 2012, which left their customers unable to access their accounts and make online payments, but were still staff were required to manually update balances at this time. So this not only damaged their brand but cost a millions in lost business. Paris over the airport suffered a similar, you know, example of laxity failing on them.

00:33:58:14 - 00:34:19:11

Sarah

The airport was forced into grounding planes for hours after an instance of windows 3.1 crashed in bad weather, and this system at the time was 23 years old. So it's kind of deeply concerning when you start lifting up, you know, the kind of hood of the car engine and looking underneath it and going, what is this thing actually running on?

00:34:19:11 - 00:34:55:04

Sarah

It's woefully outdated. And the thing that caught my eye the most recently actually about legacy, it was a headline, actually, that came out the other day and the headline said Capgemini to Keep the Legacy Lights on at HMRC for 245.5 million pounds. And it's just kind of nuts the amount of money we end up putting into just managing stuff that's really outdated and keeping that knowledge alive to keep the lights on.

00:34:55:06 - 00:35:25:02

Sarah

And I just find this stuff kind of nuts where both you and I have worked, I guess, a lot in digital transformation. You know, they estimate that digital transformation spending is projected to reach $3.9 trillion globally by 2027, and it feels like we're sort of stuck on this loop of digitally transforming, because our technology and what we run our services and products on keeps becoming outdated.

00:35:25:04 - 00:35:49:06

Lou

You know, like a time capsule. We make it and we go, wow, that's done. It's running the thing. Let's go. And then we come back round for this transformation. It feels like a sort of vinyl record going round. Yeah. And this really makes me think of one of the first things that someone said to me when I started working at, Government Digital Service, and that was the only reason we need transformation is because we didn't do any continuous improvement work.

00:35:49:08 - 00:36:08:15

Lou

Yeah. I mean, it was like this really, you know, sly thing that we kind of, you know, sort of would whisper to each other because it's true, you know, we we just leave stuff and we think that the internet is going to be done and then it will stop changing. And everyone can down tools and we can just leave it for another 5000, 150 years.

00:36:08:15 - 00:36:28:06

Lou

And it will it just won't break. But of course it will because everything else around us moves. Not doing anything is not a neutral position. And hearing you talk about legacy in that way, it just reminds me of the fact that in these sorts of conversations, legacy becomes this kind of like boogeyman. You know, that's under the bed.

00:36:28:08 - 00:36:58:07

Lou

We don't know what it is. No one knows what the legacy is or how it works or why it's a problem. But if you ever question, you know, the legacy, and whether or not it can be changed, often you're met with, well, obviously, no, it's far too complex. And I think there's something really interesting about this kind of just assumption about legacy and its complexity that stops us from poking at it and going, okay, well, what can we do piece by piece to get off of it?

00:36:58:08 - 00:37:37:07

Lou

And it reminds me, actually, of a particular encounter that I had with legacy in government. And I won't tell you which system it was, but it was gonna tell us to get no, no, really? No, I'm really tempted to, but I will, you might be able to guess. Anyway, it was a register of things that have a very short lifespan and a lot of money was going in to basically propping up this register of things that had the very short lifespan, until someone pointed out that actually, given that these particular things only had a lifespan of about, you know, kind of 2 to 3 years, that perhaps, maybe we could probably build

00:37:37:07 - 00:38:02:20

Lou

a new register. And by the time we'd built that new register, all of the things that were on the old register would probably not exist anymore. So there's often two or 3 or 4 steps removed that we need to be from the legacy to actually put it back in context, as we were talking about context, to understand, actually, is this even important for us to preserve, or should we just build something else or is this thing even doing what it needs to do in the first place?

00:38:02:23 - 00:38:39:24

Sarah

I really like what you're saying about, technology is a living system, and it goes beyond the database and interface to really thinking actually about the future of how we fund the change, how we think about the change, about, you know, building that into our development work. Right. Yeah. And I think we think about things differently if we think about them in the future, you know, if we sort of put ourselves into the future as you know, many of those Time Capsule creators have done and we think about how is someone going to read this in the future, how are they going to access this information?

00:38:39:24 - 00:39:01:06

Lou

All they even going to understand it. Then we start to build things differently. And this actually goes back to some of the really core principles about how digital things should get made in the culture of the internet. Right. And, you know, one of the, the most fundamental principles at government digital Service of make things open, it makes things better.

00:39:01:08 - 00:39:27:17

Unknown

you know, the whole idea with that of publishing your code in the open is so that other people can spot problems with it and iterate it and move it on and, you know, keep it current. And that's really, really important. And there's a brilliant quote from, Maria Farrell in a blog post that she wrote about, rewilding the internet that says whoever controls infrastructure determines the future.

00:39:27:19 - 00:39:51:14

Lou

If you doubt that, consider that in Europe, we are still using roads and living in towns and cities that the Roman Empire mapped out 2000 years ago. And that strikes me as so, so true and so resonant of legacy that, you know, essentially when we create infrastructure for how things work, those things are often what define how everything else that sits on top of it works.

00:39:51:14 - 00:40:21:09

Lou

And that's why it's so important that that infrastructure is constantly moving and constantly evolving. And that's why we need to think about the infrastructure of our services being flexible too. And, you know, also part of that is about recognizing the cost and effort of doing that, because, of course, you know, this stuff doesn't come for free in this idea of constant evolution and change to our services is something that we, you know, also need to bear the long and ongoing cost for.

00:40:21:09 - 00:40:52:18

Lou

And this is why we get stuck in this kind of never ending replace, replace, replace, replace, cycle. Rather than iterating and changing and improving something over time, it's because we've created something that's so complex that nobody knows how it works anymore, and that person has retired or since passed away sometimes. and then we have to go back to it and we go, well, I have no idea what on earth this thing is or how it works, so let's just make another one.

00:40:52:20 - 00:41:24:24

Lou

or, you know, slap some extra technology on top of it and hope that, you know, that will somehow, retrospectively make it easier and, to use. And I guess all of this is aiming towards what we should be doing, which is making something that can be picked up and changed by anyone without context. And I think that's what we can really learn from those Marie barrels, because the reason why someone can pick up a movie barrel, you know, 50 years later, is because they've got an old mirror army barrel in front of them that they can understand.

00:41:24:24 - 00:41:44:04

Lou

They can look at the joinery, they can understand the tools that were used to make it. And to some extent the marami barrel is readable. It's understandable just by looking at it and pulling apart and understanding it, and it can be remade and that is very different to the technology that we have built to underpin our services. It's very complex.

00:41:44:04 - 00:42:12:24

Lou

We haven't documented it and so we end up with something that is completely impossible to repair. But it's also not just technology that we need to understand the context for. And the history of it's also decision making, right? Because our services are not just made up of technology, they're also made up of policies. And sometimes we run into problems where we actually don't really know why a decision has been made or can't track that decision within a service as well.

00:42:13:03 - 00:42:34:15

Sarah

Do we have things like, I mean, this reminds me of grandfather rights, or some people call them grandfather clauses or grandfathering or being grandfathered in. and that's like a provision in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations. While a new rule will apply to all future cases. And this is kind of like what you're saying around, we need to know the history of decisions.

00:42:34:21 - 00:42:54:13

Lou

And I guess the policy and stuff that goes into that. Right. Especially when you've got things like grandfathered rights. Yeah. And grandfather rights applied to so many different things. Right. So, you know, driving licenses where if you got your license in the 1980s, the rules around what you can drive are very different to what you can drive now, but also things like court convictions.

00:42:54:15 - 00:43:19:24

Lou

And this is why, you know, documentation of those decisions is that you find in, you know, a legal context and things like LexisNexis, which documents, you know, the basically the outcomes of lots of different court proceedings are really important because things like the law are based on precedent. You know, the reason why we make this decision now is because we made this decision in 1880, or you know, 1990.

00:43:20:01 - 00:43:59:21

Lou

So other people's decisions in the past have a huge impact on what we now decide. and this is, you know, why archivists document the changes that they have made to a particular thing. If you've ever seen a restoration conservator, looking after an artwork, you know, they're spending as much time restoring that particular artwork as they are documenting exactly what they've done to their artwork, but also making sure that anything they do, any kind of cleaning or any kind of varnishing, any kind of chemicals they're applying, can also be removed by someone else in the future, should they not agree with that particular decision.

00:43:59:21 - 00:44:21:02

Lou

So it's about understanding the history of the decision so that you can understand what you need to do now. But it's also about being able to potentially undo that decision and go back in time and say that actually we want to do something else. And this really reminds me of an excellent blog post that was written by Duncan Brown, who's head of software engineering for the Cabinet Office's incubator for AI.

00:44:21:02 - 00:44:47:03

Lou

And he wrote, institutional memory is powerful because once you understand why things are the way that they are, you get to change them. And I think that is incredibly true. And why this, you know, documentation of decisions is so important in everything from art conservation to legal precedent and things like LexisNexis and services. Right. It feels like this kind of preservation of knowledge is so important.

00:44:47:05 - 00:45:20:04

Lou

And that, as we've sort of been talking about, context is everything to understanding decisions, and it helps us to make decisions in the future. And when I was doing my digging on time capsules, I found actually that the International Time Capsule Society have guidelines, actually, for constructing what they call the ideal cache. And I mean, one of the things I just picked out, which I loved, was try to have a mix of items from the sublime to the trivial, which I sort of love, but it really comes back to this quote that we talked about at the start of the podcast, that it's the context that matters.

00:45:20:04 - 00:45:52:16

Sarah

And when we have a time capsule, when we open it, this is precisely what slips away the moment that we've actually opened it. Because all of that kind of really important knowledge about the decisions we made is kind of lost because it's just, inanimate objects and coming back round to the whole golden disc thing. Ferris, who was called again, sort of fellow initiator of the exercise, said that it involved a considerable number of presuppositions about what aliens want to know about us and how they might interpret their selections.

00:45:52:18 - 00:46:19:06

Sarah

And Lomborg, who was another kind of fellow initiator of the the initiative in Murmurs of Earth, which is a kind of 1978 book on making the record, said that when they were making the selections, he found himself increasingly playing the role of extraterrestrial. And I just love that quote on so many levels about what we're talking about, not only just thinking about how someone in the future will interpret something that you've made and the decisions that went into it.

00:46:19:06 - 00:46:36:13

Sarah

But also, I just think the meta level of it being an extraterrestrial, someone who might not understand even what was made, has to be able to interpret what is being shown to them. And, you know, he went on in the book to say that when considering photographs to include the panel, was really careful to try to eliminate those that could be misconstrued.

00:46:36:15 - 00:47:05:21

Sarah

the war is a reality of human existence. Images of it might send an aggressive message when the record was intended as a friendly gesture. It's a really kind of thoughtful, The team veered from politics and religion in its effort to be as inclusive as possible, given the limited amount of space, that they had. So kind of coming back up to the modern day and not about golden discs in space and crypts under the ground, where do we see decision making being documented in service development and technological development today?

00:47:05:21 - 00:47:41:17

Sarah

Well, you know, GitHub is a really great example of that. And I guess other design systems where we see things like pull requests and forks and if you're not familiar with that language, you know, as Lee said earlier, we see a sort of register, essentially of additional decisions being documented on how to change a piece of software or a design, but away from technology and maybe kind of interface design decisions that we can see documented and good design systems in services, it's maybe slightly less tangible, and we don't often see really good documentation of how decisions get made in and around services.

00:47:41:17 - 00:48:06:00

Sarah

And I came across design histories. I think it was Audrey Fletcher that first put me onto them. They are, an amazing bit, like a GitHub for software, but the GitHub for service decisions, they are a documentation over time of decisions, that have been made in a service and Department of Education have been running their own design histories work for many years, now.

00:48:06:00 - 00:48:20:18

Sarah

And actually, I think that they, they sort of run it almost like a service unto itself. So you can apply to start a design history and what you show in public, which I think is great, as you said, loo work in the open, it makes things better. But I think they also have some private behind the scenes stuff that the document as well.

00:48:20:19 - 00:48:40:18

Sarah

But this is great. It's kind of like a time capsule but for services and decisions. Yeah. And there's this really great blog post from Paul Hayes from the Department of Education. and in it he says that sometimes the reasoning behind a particular design feature can get lost or hidden in code, or the rationale may be obvious only in certain user journeys.

00:48:40:18 - 00:49:05:06

Sarah

And I think that is a fantastic example of, firstly, why it's so important to document those decisions, because they're often smoothed over when we actually ship or develop a particular thing. You know, it's just get sort of flattened down into the interface, but also that certain decisions can sometimes only apply to certain user groups or certain pathways. They're very important.

00:49:05:06 - 00:49:47:17

Lou

But we know why we did those things. So that, you know, we can go back and we can undo them or we can change them, but they're lost in certain user journeys. And I think that's really wonderful. that he's described it in that way. And I think to some extent, actually, documentation is kind of a bit of a counterbalance to our inability to really think about those long term consequences of our decisions sometimes because, you know, ultimately, if we had a long term, enduring team doing continuous improvement on our services for a long time, that document station probably would become maybe slightly less important because we would have that kind of team institutional knowledge

00:49:47:17 - 00:50:14:01

Lou

that was passed on from, you know, product manager to product manager, from designer to designer. We would have that kind of crossover. And of course, documentation is still really important in that context, don't get me wrong. But you know, that enduring thing, change that we're making on an ongoing basis to our service often doesn't happen. So documentation becomes really important when there is no handover, when the team is disbanded and we have to come back to something.

00:50:14:01 - 00:50:40:16

Sarah

In retrospect, I love what you said there. Documentation is a counterbalance to an ability to think long term as organizations. It reminds me of, this clock of the long now, which was made by the Long Now Foundation, which is an organization dedicated to fostering responsible, long term thinking framed within a context of deep time. Because we have such a short termism attitudes in our society and to to promote their say they created.

00:50:40:16 - 00:51:02:01

Sarah

This clock is long now, which is a self-sustaining 10,000 year clock and a capital for time itself. And the clock is intended to serve as a mechanism and a myth to counterbalance civilization's pathologically short attention span and I, I just I love that pathologically short attention span. And it feels that that is what our organizations are operating on.

00:51:02:01 - 00:51:24:17

Sarah

And for I understand like good reason political cycles, you know, finance not being available, you know, money being tight, living in a time of austerity, how we kind of invest in that long term thinking. But this feels so much about kind of actually taking on some of the thinking of how we consider time capsules in a good way, thinking about the future, thinking about the future interpretation of our work.

00:51:24:17 - 00:51:47:19

Sarah

And, you know, I think I've always heard you describe service designers. It's not a it's not a sprint. It's a it's not even a marathon. It's a really live race. And a really race requires that collaboration of handover, you know, a kind of almost have this vision in my head of those little batons, time capsules of extra carrots being passed along in a painfully fresh one going around in a big Olympic like stadium, little carrots being passed along.

00:51:47:24 - 00:52:13:01

Sarah

Anyway, you know where I'm going with it, I just I love that we got to combat that pathologically short attention span. And I think, yeah, as you're saying, like documenting decisions to help us all out, to be able to kind of keep something alive and keep it moving is is brilliant. And sometimes I think it means going back to that service or that object or that thing that we're working on and understanding why things happened in retrospect.

00:52:13:01 - 00:52:43:06

Lou

And I think this is why so much of service design is actually archeology. You know, we're often having to go back to why that service was created in the first place. What was the intention, what outcome do we want to get to? And very often over time, through institutional churn, we just stop talking about those things. So actually that that institutional knowledge of particularly those big questions like, why are we even doing this in the first place, are precisely the ones that get lost.

00:52:43:06 - 00:53:02:12

Lou

So when it comes to transforming that thing, then many, many years later, we're often left with this kind of service that becomes a bit of a an archeological object where, you know, we don't really know why this thing exists anymore, and we're kind of just using it as a doorstop because it looks a bit like a doorstop. And, you know, actually, that's not what it was intended for.

00:53:02:14 - 00:53:18:21

Lou

and I think, you know, that's where we need to, to kind of start focusing. I think some of our efforts of documentation is really not just those small decisions about, you know, why is this part of the interface work in the way that it does? Or why does this part of the user journey have this particular way of working?

00:53:18:21 - 00:53:47:19

Lou

But why are we doing this in the first place? What is the point? And really, what does good look like for that thing? And I think this actually really brings me back to Duncan Brown's blog post again, actually. And he sort of finishes it with, if you can grasp the true story of your work, you know, if you can understand why you're in an excellent position to make more decisions, if you can document them well, you will still have the why in the future.

00:53:47:21 - 00:54:15:09

Lou

and then you'll be able to make even more decisions. And it it just really strikes me as so true that an inability to understand why something has happened, why a service even exists, means that sometimes we end up with services we don't know why they exist makes them really difficult to change, and sometimes so difficult that actually those services take on completely new uses in the future, like an archeological object, which we don't understand the original purpose for, and we end up using it as a doorstop.

00:54:15:09 - 00:54:37:18

Lou

We have very old services that have taken on completely new uses because we don't remember why we're doing them in the first place. And I think you had a really funny story about something that, had developed a completely new use after its original function was lost. Yeah. Well, when we were talking about this, about stuff that takes on new forms because we don't really know what it was intended for in the first place.

00:54:37:20 - 00:55:00:19

Sarah

I was actually reading about, statues that are missing turrets, and I found the story of Victor Noire, who was a 19th century French journalist who was memorialized after being shot, by Napoleon's great nephew, Prince Pierre, Bonaparte. but it's now become a fertility totem as a sculptor, for some reason gave the statue a can I say this?

00:55:00:21 - 00:55:22:05

Sarah

A giant crotch bound? Do we need to put a parental warning on this? I think we might know. The fact that he was shot by Napoleon's nephew is an important. But according to legend, a woman kissing the statue's lips in giving its crotch a vigorous rub will find a husband by the end of the year, enjoy better sex life, or even become pregnant.

00:55:22:09 - 00:55:46:06

Sarah

I mean, this is, I have to say, a perfect example of the fact that form does follow function, but also function does follow form. And if you're going to make a, statue of a person with a gigantic crotch bold, it's going to take crotch both a curve balls, a crotch bulge, a bulge, it's going to take on a new function.

00:55:46:06 - 00:56:13:21

Sarah

Right? Like it doesn't really matter that it is a memorial of a very important political person. didn't you tell me that in the 1980s they found, like, this kind of weird phallic shaped object that they thought was darning tool, but actually, it was alongside a bunch of clothes, and it was really clearly something else. Yes. So this is another perfect example of this context being lost.

00:56:13:23 - 00:56:36:22

Sarah

There was a phallic shaped wooden object that was found by archeologists in the 1980s, a particularly conservative of archeologists who found it within context, surrounded by loads of clothes, and assumed that it was a darning tool. It was not a darning tool, people. It was very clearly a wooden sex toy, and anyone looking at this particular thing would know exactly what it was.

00:56:36:24 - 00:57:03:16

Sarah

And sometimes context throws off. So what was like, where have we gone and what have we learned? I think we've gone from time capsules to alien soy sauce barrels, Roman sex toys and checks. And actually we do do some notes of this podcast. I think you wrote my note for this bit. Giant Wang statues of French journalists. What have we learned loo down?

00:57:03:17 - 00:57:35:14

Lou

Oh well, firstly, we have learned the context is everything. And that understanding that your picture of Rick Astley was buried by two pre-teen girls is as important as understanding that actually, just because something looks like a darning tool and is buried with a bunch of clothes doesn't mean it is a darning tool, or that perhaps maybe your time capsule might be leading you down a, you know, pathway that actually you don't want it to because of the particular author that created it.

00:57:35:14 - 00:58:02:01

Lou

So context of understand decision making is really, really important. And, you know, we need to be aware of and understand our own biases when we are documenting stuff, because otherwise we will end up making a bias time capsule rather than necessarily a rubbish heap. And I think what I'm also taking away a bit from today and thinking about is that you need to consider how the thing you're making will be designed in the future, or changed, right?

00:58:02:01 - 00:58:21:09

Lou

Or else we end up with just unchangeable legacy, something that is unchangeable. So we need to consider how something will be modular in the future, to be able to be integrated with stuff that will be repaired, and that we actually have the skills to be able to update that and keep that thing alive, a bit like a kind of soy sauce barrels, and other examples today.

00:58:21:12 - 00:58:43:15

Lou

But if we can't do that, don't come into our decisions and rationale so that we can make better decisions in the future. And that includes nondestructive decisions that can be traced back, like we see on GitHub or in art restoration. Yeah. And I think lastly, like we need to keep knowledge alive in our cultures and thinking about continuous improvement rather than transformation.

00:58:43:15 - 00:59:09:24

Sarah

And, you know, I've always said there's a complete place for transformation when something has got to a place that it needs to be radically rethought. But when we're actually building stuff and we're thinking about the investment for it, we need to stop thinking about stuff is just a project that is sealed up an almost time capsule and just left and much more thinking about actually, how are we going to keep that thing moving over time so we don't need to always do a massive, transformation?

00:59:10:01 - 00:59:32:12

Lou

Well, usually we end this podcast with a dead end, and, wasn't that interesting, but I actually think this was quite a neatly tied end, controversially, for a podcast that was called Dead Ends. Well, I'm hoping it was interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think it was interesting. You making your own homework there? Well, yes. But, you know, we had wooden sex toys, we had archeological objects, we had giant cauldron crotch bowls.

00:59:32:12 - 00:59:54:15

Sarah

We had you can't even say giant crossbow. Like, I literally, I think we've got I think we got bold. I think we hit a dead end for be a rubbish heap, not a time capsule. Thank you very much. Cool. Thank you. Next time. Crossbow. Coach. Bolt. Oh, dear. that was a dead end podcast. We love doing this.

00:59:54:15 - 01:00:30:12

Sarah

We try to do every single month. It is everlasting conversations about all things interesting, trying to pivot around how the world actually got designed and made that way. If you're interested in keeping up with the podcast, you can go to good services forward slash Dead Ends podcast, and you can subscribe via Apple and Spotify. And if you'd like to get in touch with us and suggest some topics or tell us about something really interesting that you think would lead us to an incredibly closed off dead end, then get in touch with us on hello at the top services, but for now, thanks for listening.

01:00:30:13 - 01:00:38:00

Lou

Bye bye.

podcastdeadends

Sarah Drummond http://sarah-drummond.com/

Dead Ends: Legacy

In our third episode of Dead Ends, we talk time capsules, soy sauce, legacy IT and Rick Astley.

Dead Ends: Vernacular

Dead Ends: Patterns