Like designing things for the first time Gordon Murray insists on keeping experience 'at the back of your mind, not the front' and to work from first principles when designing. For instance, in designing a component such as a suspension wishbone, 'it's all too easy - and the longer you're in design the easier it is - to say, I know all about wishbones, this is how it's going to look because that's what wishbones look like.' But if you want to make a step forward, if you're looking for ways of making it much better and much lighter, than you have to go right back to load path analysis. It is like designing things for the first time, rather than the nth time. Nigel Cross & Anita Clayburn Cross, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray The eyes of a travelerZen Mind, Beginner's MindTotal collaboration experience
I have failed my art The novice goes astray and says, “The art has failed me.” The master goes astray and says, “I have failed my art." Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies experiencewisdom
Memory prompts Journals are memory prompts and perhaps capture exquisite (and not so exquisite) moments of experience. Roger Kitching, A Reflection of the Truth notetakingmemoryexperience
Iconography It is understandable that those students who must work from reproductions of works of art are usually more interested in iconography than in the more subtle questions of technique and quality, but it is regrettable that technical ignorance should so frequently prevent art historians from considering the whole experience of the artist. Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure artexperiencetechnique
The scale of human experience It is the scale of human experience, from which thought and imagination take off, and to which they must return. Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure creativityexperience
The downgrading of experience Today scientific constructs have become the model of describing reality rather than one of the ways of describing life around us. As a consequence there has been a very marked decrease in the reliance of people on their own experience and their own senses. The downgrading of experience and the glorification of expertise is a very significant feature of the real world of technology. Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology scienceexperience
There and not there For what Bob was trying to capture in these efforts was the incidental, the transitory, the peripheral—that aspect of our experience that is both there and not there, the object and not the object of our sensations, perceived but seldom attended to. Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees experienceperception
You leave with the art If we define art as part of the realm of experience, we can assume that after a viewer looks at a piece, they "leave" with the art, because the "art" has been experienced. We are dealing with the limits of an experience—not, for instance, with the limits of painting. Robert Irwin, James Turrell & Ed Wortz, Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971 experience
Tetlock and the Taliban An Essay by Richard Hanania richardhanania.substack.com How a humiliating military loss proves that so much of our so-called "expertise" is fake, and the case against specialization and intellectual diversity. The lesson of Tetlock (and the Afghanistan War), is that while you certainly shouldn’t be getting all your information from your uncle’s Facebook Wall, there is no reason to start with a strong prior that people with medical degrees know more than any intelligent person who honestly looks at the available data. What excellence is experienceacademiaexpertise
The Helsinki Bus Station Theory An Article by Arno Rafael Minkkinen www.fotocommunity.com Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus. Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference. The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest. ...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough. Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it. Your vision takes off. creativitypracticephotographyexperience
Seventeen Years A Song by Ratatat & Young Churf en.wikipedia.org I've been rapping for about seventeen years, okay? I don't write my stuff anymore, I just kick it from my head, you know what I'm saying? I can do that. No disrespect— But that's how I am Everything has been composed experienceskill
I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine An Article by Rach Smith rachsmith.com What I’ve learnt through experience is that the number of languages I’ve learned or the specific frameworks I’ve gained experience with matters very little. What actually matters is my ability to up-skill quickly and effectively. If you focus on: learning how you best learn, and practicing effectively communicating the things you've learned you can't go wrong. learningprogrammingskillexperiencepractice
The brag document An Article by Julia Evans jvns.ca It’s frustrating to have done something really important and later realize that you didn’t get rewarded for it just because the people making the decision didn’t understand or remember what you did. The tactic is pretty simple! Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season! workexperiencememorycollections
Eyes on the ground A Quote by Akira Kurosawa www.youtube.com When you go mountain climbing, the first thing you’re told is not to look at the peak but to keep your eyes on the ground as you climb. You just keep climbing patiently one step at a time. If you keep looking at the top, you’ll get frustrated. I think writing is similar. You need to get used to the task of writing. You must make an effort to learn to regard it not as something painful but as routine. writingexperienceskill
The Architecture of Happiness A Book by Alain de Botton www.alaindebotton.com A few millimeters apartTragic colorsClassical absurdityIdeas of a good lifeThe people we love+13 More architecturehappinesslife
A few millimeters apart Aesthetes force us to consider whether happiness may not sometimes turn on the presence or absence of a fingerprint, whether in certain situations beauty and ugliness may not lie only a few millimeters apart, whether a single mark might not wreck a wall or an errant brush stroke undo a landscape painting. details
Tragic colors Life may have to show itself to us in some of its authentically tragic colors before we can begin to grow properly visually responsive to its subtler offerings. melancholy
Classical absurdity Corbusier observed that the requirements of flight of necessity rid airplanes of all superfluous decoration and so unwittingly transformed them into successful pieces of architecture. To place a Classical statue atop a house was as absurd as to add one to a plane, he noted, but at least by crashing in response to this addition, the plane had the advantage of rendering its absurdity starkly manifest. Shorten the wingsTowards a New ArchitectureForm follows function function
Ideas of a good life In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak of visions of happiness. To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase, and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life. architecturebeauty
The people we love The objects we describe as beautiful are versions of the people we love. loveobjects
The search for happiness If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes. happiness
An equivalence In both early Christianity and Islam, theologians made a claim about architecture likely to sound so peculiar to modern ears as to be worth of sustained examination: they proposed that beautiful buildings had the power to improve us morally and spiritually. They believed that, rather than corrupting us, rather than being an idle indulgence for the decadent, exquisite surroundings could edge us towards perfection. A beautiful building could reinforce our resolve to be good. Behind this distinctive claim lay another astonishing belief: that of an equivalence between the visual and ethical realms. ethicsaestheticsgoodness
Inwardly to resemble What we want, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty. We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. beauty
The gathering darkness of a Sunday evening Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored. work
What we don't like A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste may not change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disbelief. Our understanding of the psychology of taste can in turn help us to escape from the two great dogmas of aesthetics: the view that there is only one acceptable visual style or (even more implausibly) that all styles are equally valid. taste
Over-imagination An architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor. However important originality may be in some fields, restraint and adherence to procedure emerge as the more significant virtues in a great many others. We rarely wish to be surprised by novelty as we round street corners. We require consistency in our buildings, for we are ourselves frequently close to disorientation and frenzy. The signature designnovelty
The extremes of order and complexity Such works emphasize the truth of the ancient maxim that beauty lies between the extremes of order and complexity. It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word ‘beautiful’, alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled. beauty
Beauty and strength Yet the bridge testifies to how closely a certain kind of beauty is bound up with our admiration for strength, for man-made objects which can withstand the life-destroying forces of heat, cold, gravity or wind. We respond with emotion to creations which transport us across distances we could never walk, which shelter us during storms we could not weather, which pick up signals we could never hear with our own ears and which hang daintily off cliffs from which we would fall instantly to our deaths. beauty
With grace and economy Both bridges accomplish daring feats, but Maillart’s possesses the added virtue of making its achievement look effortless - and because we sense it isn’t, we wonder at it and admire it all the more. The bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance - holding, spanning, sheltering - with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted. beauty
The dignity of age Wood and stone, and now concrete and wood, age slowly and with dignity. They do not shatter hysterically like glass, or tear like paper, but discolor with a melancholy, noble air. Things that shine and glitter time
Apportioning value Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. ‘Culture’ is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to. aesthetics
There was no fog in London It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. Oscar Wilde referred to this phenomenon when he quipped that there was no fog in London before Whistler started painting the Thames. Likewise, there must have been little beauty in old stones before Japanese priests and poets began writing about them.
To the worms and the trees We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness. architecture