I was sitting on a bench on 24th Street in Noe Valley, coffee in hand, watching a crew work on a three-story Edwardian home down the block. I used to live in San Francisco, and I recognized a seismic retrofit in progress; I’d seen this kind of work before. What I hadn’t done previously was stop and pay attention to one in progress. Nothing was being torn down. A small team was working steel into the existing frame, using tools that looked like what I’d expect to see at any construction site — nothing specialized, nothing unusual.
The garage is what I kept looking at. The opening at street level seemed to drop back farther than a single level of parking should allow. I sat there wondering whether I was looking at two stacked levels underneath the house. I don’t know enough about the city’s building limits to say whether that’s even possible. After thinking about it, I decided I was probably looking at a vertical car-stacking lift, a system that lets one garage opening hold twice the cars it appears to hold. Noe Valley has enough wealth concentrated in three-story Edwardians that this kind of luxury home improvement isn’t much of a stretch.
I’d been in a meeting in Silicon Valley earlier that morning about content operations for a tech writing team. The longer I watched, the more my brain started making connections between what I was seeing and what we’d discussed earlier — that’s just how my crazy brain works, jumping between unrelated things until sometimes, if I’m lucky, something clicks.
As I watched the improvements being made to prepare the house to withstand an earthquake it struck me that using this metaphor might be a useful way to help organizations understand why they need to think about retrofitting their content for AI.
