ritual
Sort of underway by then
The most incidental detail
A ritual of unpacking
I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.
Dwelling in ritual
Even a dwelling is a device that generates a distinct pattern of daily activities and their relationships. Some buildings are explicitly built for ritual, but the repetition of any activity, either mundane or religious, tends to ritualize them, and by facilitating this, an architectural structure can turn gradually – sometimes even unnoticeably – into an instrument of ritual.
The ritualized use of a place
The association of comfort with people and place are reinforced by the ritualized use of a place. Using a place at a set time and in a specific manner creates a constancy as dependable as the place itself. It establishes, in time and behavior, a definition of place as strong as any architectural spatial definition, such as an aedicula, might be. Ritualized use can do more than reinforce the affection for a place. Through ritual, a place becomes an essential element in the customs of a people.
Apologia
If the features of many are compared
Almost all fields today are concerned in one way or another with hierarchical structure, and a theory, or perhaps more usefully a metaphor, common to all may emerge if the features of many are compared.
Though the units in different fields are different, in all of them meaning comes through communication: patterns of communication are common to all, with aggregation leading to diversity or unity, and the clumps of unity themselves serving in turn as units in larger structrures based on more complex but still direct communication.
Pebbles on the beach
Newton picked up the pebbles on his metaphoric beach with an intellectual objective in mind, but his ancestor in paleolithic times picked up real minerals because he enjoyed looking at them: quite inadvertently he started the chain of practice and craftsmanship and thought that led to the diversity of specialized materials and generalized theory today.
More like the early Homo sapiens than the sixteenth-century intellectual giant I have enjoyed a life of rather undisciplined wandering and search.
Half-formed perception
Science must be simple, yet the human brain has a structure that gives it the capacity for relating to the world in its undivided complexity in ways that are not logical, though they are effective. Aesthetic interest aroused by observation and half-formed perception seems usually, perhaps always, to precede exact analysis.
Interdisciplinary
These papers are probably to be called interdisciplinary—an “in” word these days—but any value they may have derives from the fact that the author started with a rather deep immersion in a single discipline. One cannot hope to understand the nature of interaction between impinging areas without a firm knowledge of at least one of them.