When I was just a kid* asking questions at lectures was pretty scary.

I’ve just got back from the design modeling symposium in Berlin, and it got me thinking about asking questions, and the reasons behind it again.

In my first year I’d sit in the dark, uncomfortable, raked seating at Brookes every Tuesday, watching people who were being presented as infallible exemplars of what I was supposed to become. After their allotted time (and generally a fair bit more - being concise doesn’t seem to be virtue that has ever been valued in architecture) the bigger boys and girls from the diploma course would ask questions.

Even at the time, as a fresh, optimistic nineteen year old I thought something was wrong with what was going on.

The principle is admirable: take someone who has done pretty well at what you’d like to do well at, get them to show their work to give some context, and then get them to answer some questions. In reality things are a little different, the ‘post-presentation question’ seems to be predominately about glorifying the questioner rather than about extracting useful, enriching information.

In the ideal world there are two main types of useful question.

• Type one is about a naive questioner asking for knowledge to be passed on.
• Type two is a 'wise' questioner asking a naive presenter something to pushing themselves into a new area of thought.

Unfortunately there seems to be very few of either type of question asked. the predominant class of question seems to be the ‘statement with a question mark’. Obviously there is often a need to preface a question with some context to reduce ambiguity, but I usually feel that the ratio of context is too far towards the statement. (I usually don’t provide enough context to my questions, wrongly assuming that the presenter can read my mind.)

I seem to have gone off on a bit of a rantangent, but bringing it back onto current affairs, I thought I might propose some draft rules for asking questions.

• **Only ask a question if you actually want an answer**. It's tempting to show off to the audience how awesomely clever you are, but don't.
• **Don't publicly ask esoteric questions.** You are asking a question in public so you must first ask yourself if the answer is of interest to other people. If not, track the speaker down afterwards and ask them in private. You are more likely to get a really good answer when the pressure is off.
• **Don't be afraid to ask questions for fear of looking foolish**. Unless you are radically out of your depth, then if you don't get it, then there is probably a large proportion of the audience who are in the same position as you. Ask, and if it is trivial, then the answer will be mercifully swift and more questions can follow.

These should do it I think, but if you have any modifications/additions, then feel free.

There were some great examples at the design modeling conference. Benjamin Samuel Koren from Herzog & de Meuron gave a talk about the acoustics of their new concert hall, and made a reference to an object oriented programming language, an audience member asked what one was and everyone groaned, looked amazed that there was anyone in the universe that didn’t know about ‘oop’. I think that this is a good example of the correct application of rule 3. She didn’t know what it was, and the explanation was clear, so now she does. The great side effect of this was that I got a different, much clearer explanation of what it was all about.

On the other hand there were several questions, usually following keynotes (perhaps these perpetrators of the statements with question marks were too important to go to the case studies) that would go on for just long enough for the rest of the audience to loose the thread and then end with something along the lines of "do you agree?".

I fear that if you’ve read all the way down to here, then I must apologise for ranting.

*_{these days I am not just a kid, remaining a kid is hard work!}