Understanding
From a roving viewpoint
A state of quietness
In a state of reverberation
Practice before theory
When we say we know Hamlet
You only understand something relative to something you already understand
Mondegreen
Understanding its essence
How our understanding is working
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
Everything that can be said
Agents of thought and experiment
For one who can see
I don't think you understand
I think very well of him indeed
Admitting ignorance
Dead cities
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
99% Invisible
Understanding Understanding
To Make a Book, Walk on a Book
When their salary depends on not understanding it
A Quote by Upton SinclairIt is difficult to get people to understand something, when their salary depends on not understanding it.
Keep digging
An Article by Ryan SingerThe hardest thing about customer interviews is knowing where to dig. An effective interview is more like a friendly interrogation. We don’t want to learn what customers think about the product, or what they like or dislike — we want to know what happened and how they chose... To get those answers we can’t just ask surface questions, we have to keep digging back behind the answers to find out what really happened.
Clues for software design in how we sketch maps of cities
An Article by Matt WebbGiven there’s an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach?
Perhaps the building blocks shouldn’t be pages or blocks, but
neighbourhoods
roads
rooms and doors
landmarks.Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away.
How am I doing, wonder?
A Quote by Louis KahnForm comes from wonder. Wonder stems from our 'in touchness' with how we were made. One senses that nature records the process of what it makes, so that in what it makes there is also the records of how it was made. In touch with this record we are in wonder. This wonder gives rise to knowledge. But knowledge is related to other knowledge and this relation gives a sense of order, a sense of how they inter-relate in a harmony that makes all things exist. From knowledge to sense of order we then wink at wonder and say How am I doing, wonder?
Pellucidity
A DefinitionFree from obscurity and easy to understand; the comprehensibility of clear expression
What 80% Comprehension Feels Like
An ArticleOne of the major principles of extensive reading is that if a learner can comprehend material at 98% comprehension, she will acquire new words in context, in a painless, enjoyable way. But what is 98% comprehension?
The case for rereading
An Article by Mandy BrownReread a book enough times, or often enough—keep it at hand so you can flip to dog-eared pages and marked up passages here and there—and it will eventually root itself in your mind. It becomes both a reference point and a connector, a means of gathering your knowledge and experience, drawing it all together. It becomes the material through which you engage with the world.
How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think
An EssayWhat we have known since long
A Quote by Ludwig WittgensteinThe problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
Making sense
A Quote by Pablo PicassoThe world doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
I am an explorer
A Quote by C.S. LewisI do not sit down at my desk to put into in verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind I would have no incentive or need to write about it. I am an explorer…We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand.
The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
Thin ice
Today the 'depth of our being' stands on thin ice.
Extensions of the tactile sense
"Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It is the sense which became differentiated into the others." — Ashley Montagu
All the senses, including vision, are extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specializations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching, and thus related to tactility.
The computer creates a distance
Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in a haptic contact with the object, or space.
The quality of an architectural reality
The quality of an architectural reality seems to depend fundamentally on peripheral vision, which enfolds the subject in the space...neurological investigations suggest that our processes of perception and cognition advance from the instantaneous grasp of entities towards the identification of details, rather than the other way around.
A hierarchical system of sense
During the Renaissance, the five senses were understood to form a hierarchical system from the highest sense of vision down to touch. Vision was correlated to fire and light, hearing to air, smell to vapour, taste to water, and touch to earth.
The inhumanity of contemporary architecture
The inhumanity of contemporary architecture and cities can be understood as the consequence of the neglect of the body and the senses, and an imbalance in our sensory system.
The art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world.
Modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.
Estrangement and detachment, hospitals and airports
It is thought-provoking that this sense of estrangement and detachment is often evoked by the technologically most advanced settings, such as hospitals and airports.
Sonorisms IV
'an unending rainfall of images' (Calvino)
a cancerous growth of vision
we are unable to see or imagine life behind these walls
the patina of wear
to carve a volume into the void of darkness
time turned into shapeThe tacit wisdom of the body
It is evident that the architecture of traditional cultures is also essentially connected with the tacit wisdom of the body, instead of being visually and conceptually dominated. Construction in traditional cultures is guided by the body in the same way that a bird shapes its nest by movements of its body.
Mere retinal art
Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.
Architecture of our time often appears as mere retinal art.
Stage sets for the eye
With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body – and particularly for the hand – architectural structures become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft further turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction. The sense of 'aura', the authority of presence, that Walter Benjamin regards as a necessary quality for an authentic piece of art, has been lost.
Vision reveals what the touch already knows
Deep shadows and darkness are essential
During overpowering emotional experiences, we tend to close off the distancing sense of vision; we close the eyes when dreaming, listening to music, or caressing our beloved ones. Deep shadows and darkness are essential, because they dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy.
The street of an old town
How much more mysterious and inviting is the street of an old town with its alternating realms of darkness and light than are the brightly and evenly lit streets of today! Homogenous bright light paralyzes the imagination in the same way that homogenization of space weakens the experience of being, and wipes away the sense of place. The human eye is most perfectly tuned for twilight rather than bright daylight.
To carve a volume into the void of darkness
The nocturnal sound is a reminder of human solitude and mortality, and it makes one conscious of the entire slumbering city. Anyone who has become entranced by the sound of dripping water in the darkness of a ruin can attest to the extraordinary capacity of the ear to carve a volume into the void of darkness. The space traced by the ear in the darkness becomes a cavity sculpted directly in the interior of the mind.
The door handle is the handshake of a building
Time turned into shape
A pebble polished by waves is pleasurable to the hand, not only because of its soothing shape, but because it expresses the slow process of its formation; a perfect pebble on the palm materializes duration, it is time turned into shape.
Authentic architectural experiences
Authentic architectural experiences consist of approaching or confronting a building, rather than the formal apprehension of a facade; of the act of entering, and not simply the visual design of the door; of looking in or out through a window, rather than the window itself as a material object; or of occupying the sphere of warmth, rather than the fireplace as an object of visual design.
Architectural space is lived space rather than physical space, and lived space always transcends geometry and measurability.
From body to body
During the design process, the architect gradually internalizes the landscape, the entire context, and the functional requirements as well as his/her conceived building: movement, balance and scale are felt unconsciously through the body of the observer, the experience mirrors the bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture is communication from the body of the architect directly to the body of the person who encounters the work, perhaps centuries later.