[OT] Re: Intellectual Property in Network Design

Sat Feb 14 02:13:42 UTC 2015

William,

I beg to differ though this is getting slightly off topic.

Art = something different, unexpected, not quite in your ordinary
experience yet related to your ordinary experience.

Art is connected to what we experience every day but it represents some
kind of transformation of the everyday. Something that is not actually
entirely real, it can’t be found by locating it. It requires human
intervention, it’s the finger print if you will, of our existence in the
world that has its impact on things that we transform through the use of
imagination.

How can architecture being an interaction of time, process, flow, people
and things be art? The answer is elegance. It inspires people to see things
in a new way and the interaction with people is the clearest point where
architecture becomes an art.

Properly architected network not only need to work well now, they must also
provide a foundation for business and transform business, provide
boundaries for information and people, and yet enable collaboration.

We are entering an age of agile service creation with virtualized IT
infrastructure, breaking down old constraints in many domains, including
the delivery of services. No need to dwell further in to this era of SDN
and NFV.

To achieve all this, network designs must go beyond mechanical algorithms,
and even beyond the uncertain empirical, into the world of abstract
concept, mathematical theory, and raw power.

Network architecture is not just about configuring routers, switches,
firewalls or load balancers. One must think beyond that.

How does technology drive the business?

What is the perception of the network within the organization?

What is the perception of the technology stance beyond the organization?

If competitors see your network design, will they wonder why they didn’t
think of it, or just wonder why it works at all? If a potential partner
sees your network design, will they see the future or the past?

All these things contribute art to the world of network architecture.

Here is a question for you;

When you observe a beautifully architected building, what do you see?

(Link to some examples)
http://www.azuremagazine.com/article/2014-top-10-architecture-projects/

Is it all about noticing the details, making observation about textures,
lines materials, shapes, proportions, light and shadow?

Or do we agree that architects don't only deal with buildings - they think
of people, places, materials, philosophy and history, and only then
consider the actual building?

Ahad

-----Original Message-----
From: William Waites [mailto:wwaites at tardis.ed.ac.uk]
Sent: Friday, 13 February 2015 8:55 PM
To: ahad at telcoinabox.com
Cc: skeeve at eintellegonetworks.com; owen at delong.com; bill at herrin.us;
nanog at nanog.org
Subject: [OT] Re: Intellectual Property in Network Design

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 11:43:14 +1100, Ahad Aboss <ahad at telcoinabox.com> said:

    > In a sense, you are an artist as network architecture

    > is an art in itself.  It involves interaction with time,

    > processes, people and things or an intersection between all.

This Friday's off-topic post for NANOG:

Doing art is creative practice directed to uncover something new and not
pre-conceived.  Successful acts of art produce something that not only
wasn't there before but that nobody thought could be there. The art is the
change in thinking that results. Whatever else is left over is residue.

An engineer or architect in the usual setting, no matter how skilled, is
not doing art because the whole activity is pre-conceived. Even a clean and
elegant design is not usually intended to show beautiful connections
between ideas the same way poetry or mathematics might. Hiring an engineer
for this purpose almost never happens in industry. Rather the purpose is to
make a thing that does what it is intended to do. It is craft, or
second-order residue. Useful, possibly difficult, but not art.

Some people want to claim ownership of a recipe for predictably creating
residue of a certain kind. An artist knows that this is not good for doing
art because nothing new can come from it. If they are committed to their
practice, they will not seek to prevent others from using an old recipe.
Why would they? They have already moved on.

Some older thoughts on the topic: http://archive.groovy.net/syntac/