The picket fence There was a fence with spaces you could look through if you wanted to. An architect who saw this thing stood there one summer evening. Took out the spaces with great care and built a castle in the air. The fence was utterly dumbfounded, each post stood there with nothing round it. Christian Morgenstern, The Art of Looking Sideways www.andrew.cmu.edu spacearchitectureabsurdity
Reversibility of perspectives Irwin's thinking was informed by the writings of Alfred Schutz, a follower of Husserl, ...[who] had noted that typification was at the basis of the assumption of the reversibility of perspectives, which was a condition for the possibility of intersubjective experience and the notion of a shared, commonly experienced world. It is also the first step in overcoming the specificity of the individual in favor of knowledge about groups. What is gained by this procedure is an understanding of demographics, but the cost of this understanding is a lack of emphasis on differences between individuals and their unique subjective experiences. Matthew Simms, Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art You and your user are one