Data Center Is the Building Type of the 21st Century. What Can We Learn From Them About the Future of Design?
In the third season of HBO’s Silicon Valley, there is a scene where two programmers visit a building that is going to host their servers. “There’s really no difference between day and night down here, so it makes things easy,” says a technician to engineers. Nevertheless, Dinesh and Gilfoyle are horrified by the prospects of spending one year in this windowless and maze-like building as part of their contract. When asked how they can get out of the place, the technician answers, “there are 16 stairwells. Which one would you like to see first?”. Like most buildings we know, this one is designed for its residents’ breathing, thinking, and communication — but residents are not human.
People often categorize and name buildings based on the activity they help to accomplish: places for healing, learning, worshiping, etc. However, with the constant transformation of building types, modern-day buildings hardly resemble their historical predecessors. One of the forces behind such shifts is technological advances that create new possibilities and demands. Renaissance building types responded to the increasing capacity to generate and store data that reached new heights with the printing revolution of the 15th century and the digital revolution of the 20th century. Print shops, massive libraries, and administrative buildings provided a context for humans to collect, store, process, and generate information on an unprecedented scale.
The structure of these buildings afforded the users to interact with mainly textual information systems and objects: from bookshelves to server rooms, from naturally lit reading spaces to color-adjustable lights, and from writing desks to wireless printers. These buildings were home to an extended cognition system that included humans, objects, and procedures. The human body and its interaction with the rest of this cognitive machine were always a crucial part of the design choices made for these buildings. Even with computers in the office, human factors (ergonomic, lighting, ventilation) were at the front and center of the design. Architects designed these buildings with the cohabitation of humans and machines in mind.
When designers were busy designing for the harmonious life of humans and machines, another tectonic shift started happening. Ubiquitous networked technologies made it possible to generate information on a scale that no human could even dream of. The year 2005 marks the generation of one zettabyte of data (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). Since then, this number has increased with a rate of 40% per year. The increasing size of spaces needed for containing servers and particular environmental conditions needed for maintaining their optimal performance made it economically impractical to keep them in the downtown office buildings.
This quantitative shift in the scale of an information processing unit resulted in a qualitative transformation of the building type: humans and machines had to be separated. This shift was good news for office designers who don’t have to deal with monstrous computers, file cabinets, or bookshelves. They could now instead focus on designing for humans and their 1.7 cm thick laptops.
Also, with this shift, a new building typology was born: the data center. These buildings are designed not for biological human bodies to function but for microprocessors to be at their best performance and have the highest lifetime.
The emergence of data centers is not the first time the economic and functional logic has separated a space from buildings and has turned it into a new typology. Historically, facilities used to generate their power in the same place people lived and worked. However, with the advances in electric power and the grid, building a power plant generates electricity at a massive scale and sends it to every building in the city or town.
However, data centers separate and scale a set of activities that were long attributed only to humans. The data center is the first building typology ever designed that considers a non-human entity as its main subject. Microsoft’s Columbia center in Quincy, WA, is 800,000 sq2 with only 50 staff mainly working in control rooms. In a data center, servers breathe with fans, think with silicon chips and speak through wires. Still, they don’t need light to see, water coolers to have casual conversations, or bathrooms to empty their bowels.
By expanding the definition of subject to non-humans (information processing machines), data centers help us rethink the assumptions and principles of dominant design discourses such as human-centered design (HCD). This shift doesn’t mean abandoning HCD in the pursuit of a radically new paradigm. Instead, it gives us a framework and scenarios to consider new stakeholders in the design space in a future that will increasingly involve non-human elements.
