Nearer to the surface If in the following I overemphasize the Orient, this is simply because in the Far East the properties of materials are a little nearer to the surface, a little more consciously a part of what the artist is trying to show. The naturalistic aspects of Oriental philosophy encourage a sensitivity to the quality of materials — or is it the inverse, that an early enjoyment of stone, wood, clay, and fiber gave rise to the philosopher’s perception of the soul in all natural things comparable to man himself? Westerners tend to override materials, usually in ignorance, but sometimes proudly as a tour de force. Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure materialsoul
In the world of sunlight And here we come back to that forgotten, outcast word, the soul. Indeed, the soul possesses an inner light, the light that an inner vision knows and expresses in the world of brilliant colors, in the world of sunlight. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space soullight
Tiny robots A Quote "Yes, we have a soul. But it’s made of lots of tiny robots.” — Giulio Giorello Rationality: From AI to Zombies soulconsciousness
Wonder Plots Working from first principles, and working in a highly organized way seem to come naturally to him, but his personal design process is much less structured than the results might suggest. Although he can tightly organize his team and run a complex racing organisation, his personal ways of designing are relatively unstructured, based on annotated, thumb-nail sketches. ‘I don't sit down and say, OK, now I've had the idea, let's see, this is a solution, these are the different ways to go, if I do this, and do that; I do lots of scribbles just to save it, before I forget.’ Gordon’s design process is based on starting with a quick sketch of a whole idea, which is then developed through many different refinements. ‘I do a quick sketch of the whole idea, and then if there's one bit that looks good, instead of rubbing other bits out, I'd put that bit to one side; I'd do it again and expand on the good bit, and drop out the bad bit, and keep doing it, doing it; and end up with all these sketches, and eventually you end up throwing ninety percent of these away.’ He also talks to himself - or rather, writes notes to himself on the sketches; notes such as ‘rubbish’, ‘too heavy’ or ‘move it this way 30mm.’ Eventually he gets to the stage of more formal, orthographic drawings, but still drawing annotated plans, elevations and sections all together, ‘Until at the end of the day the guys at Brabham used to call them “Wonder Plots”, because they used to say “It's a wonder anybody could see what was on them”!’ Nigel Cross & Anita Clayburn Cross, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray The Design Squiggle