In the Canadian periodical, Daily Commercial News, Don Procter summarizes a recent seminar with Joe Lstiburek at the Ontario Building Envelope Council (OBEC) in Toronto. The seminar on what mistakes have taught Joe during his career as a building-science consultant – replete with classic Joe-isms, such as “There is no such thing as a free thermodynamic lunch” – offers a few examples of some “colossally-stupid things” Joe has done. But they served an important purpose.
“It is a fallacy that high performance, low-energy buildings are easy to build and less expensive in the long run than conventional designs.” Joe is quoted saying. “It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, I think we should.” … But we need to know that mistakes will be made along the way, and that might be the best reason of all to keep pushing on performance barriers.
This is not a super detailed read. It’s a quick summary, but bears close reading and points to the most important lesson of all : Doing great work, moving the needle in important ways to advance knowledge, means making mistakes, maybe even some colossal ones … And that is a good thing if, like Joe, we have the resilience and humility to learn from those errors. That’s where true knowledge comes from.