Roland Barthes wrote that the centre of Tokyo is occupied by a void...it is a quiet forest that lies at Tokyo's heart.
...The centre of Tokyo is certainly a void, but one that is protected by a circular train line, the Yamanote, which forms a 40-km (25-mile) loop around it. It seems to me that this ring of steel emphasizes the importance of the void, and the depth of its significance.
This is the first site along the tour. In here we have a void. I remember the building that used to stand here, it was painted blue. Passing through it, you can imagine how us, as ghosts – should the building be standing here – would have to actually be invisible to pass through these walls and now it’s the reverse. The building is the ghost and we’re passing through these walls.
Japanese music is above all a music of reticence, of atmosphere. When recorded, or amplified by a loudspeaker, the greater part of its charm is lost. In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses. Yet the phonograph and radio render these moments of silence utterly lifeless. And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines.
Prescriptive feedback limits creative collaboration. I’ve seen it time and time again, but I’ve struggled to articulate the exact reasons and their remedies. Recently, though, I got some insight from an unusual source: a game of chess.
In hand and brain chess, each team has two players: a “brain” and a “hand.” At the beginning of each turn, the “brain” tells the “hand” which piece to move, and the “hand” then has to move that piece, but can move it wherever they think it should go. No other communication is allowed.
In every feedback conversation, one person is the hand. That’s the person doing the design — they’ll leave the meeting and go back to their computer and fire up a dozen Adobe apps. The other people in the room (virtual or otherwise) are the brain. Regardless of their skill in design, it’s their job to give the hand some constraints to work within.