1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  2. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  3. Abo, Akinori 9
  4. aesthetics 19
  5. agile 30
  6. Albers, Josef 17
  7. Alexander, Christopher 135
  8. Alexander, Scott 5
  9. Allsopp, John 4
  10. Ammer, Ralph 6
  11. Anderson, Gretchen 7
  12. anxiety 9
  13. Appleton, Maggie 5
  14. Aptekar-Cassels, Wesley 5
  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
  18. Asimov, Isaac 5
  19. attention 17
  20. Auping, Michael 6
  21. Aurelius, Marcus 14
  22. Bachelard, Gaston 12
  23. Baker, Nicholson 10
  24. beauty 59
  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bjarnason, Baldur 8
  27. Blake, William 5
  28. blogging 23
  29. body 11
  30. Boeing, Geoff 7
  31. books 6
  32. boredom 9
  33. Botton, Alain de 38
  34. Brand, Stewart 4
  35. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  36. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  37. Broskoski, Charles 6
  38. brutalism 7
  39. building 16
  40. bureaucracy 12
  41. Burnham, Bo 9
  42. business 15
  43. Byron, Lord 14
  44. Cagan, Marty 8
  45. Calvino, Italo 21
  46. Camus, Albert 13
  47. Carruth, Shane 15
  48. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  49. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  50. chance 11
  51. change 17
  52. Chiang, Ted 4
  53. childhood 6
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Cleary, Thomas 8
  58. Cleary, J.C. 8
  59. code 20
  60. Coelho, Paulo 31
  61. collaboration 18
  62. collections 31
  63. color 23
  64. commonplace 11
  65. communication 31
  66. community 7
  67. complexity 11
  68. connection 24
  69. constraints 25
  70. construction 9
  71. content 9
  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
  74. craft 67
  75. creativity 59
  76. crime 9
  77. Critchlow, Tom 5
  78. critique 10
  79. Cross, Nigel 12
  80. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  81. css 11
  82. culture 13
  83. curiosity 11
  84. cycles 7
  85. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  86. darkness 28
  87. Darwin, Will 10
  88. data 8
  89. death 38
  90. Debord, Guy 6
  91. decisions 10
  92. design 132
  93. desire 6
  94. destiny 6
  95. details 31
  96. Dickinson, Emily 9
  97. Dieste, Eladio 4
  98. discovery 9
  99. doors 7
  100. Dorn, Brandon 11
  101. drawing 23
  102. dreams 8
  103. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  104. Duany, Andres 18
  105. Eatock, Daniel 4
  106. economics 13
  107. efficiency 7
  108. Eisenman, Peter 8
  109. Eliot, T.S. 14
  110. emotion 8
  111. ending 14
  112. engineering 12
  113. Eno, Brian 4
  114. ethics 14
  115. euphony 38
  116. Evans, Benedict 4
  117. evolution 9
  118. experience 14
  119. exploration 6
  120. farming 8
  121. fashion 11
  122. fear 7
  123. features 25
  124. flaws 10
  125. Flexner, Abraham 8
  126. food 16
  127. form 19
  128. Fowler, Martin 4
  129. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  130. fun 7
  131. function 31
  132. games 13
  133. gardens 26
  134. Garfield, Emily 4
  135. Garfunkel, Art 6
  136. geography 8
  137. geometry 18
  138. goals 9
  139. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  140. goodness 13
  141. Graham, Paul 37
  142. graphics 13
  143. Greene, Erick 6
  144. Hamming, Richard 45
  145. happiness 18
  146. Harford, Tim 4
  147. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  148. Hayes, Brian 28
  149. heat 7
  150. Heinrich, Bernd 7
  151. Herbert, Frank 4
  152. Heschong, Lisa 27
  153. Hesse, Herman 6
  154. history 14
  155. Hoffman, Yoel 10
  156. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
  157. home 15
  158. Hoy, Amy 4
  159. Hoyt, Ben 5
  160. html 11
  161. Hudlow, Gandalf 4
  162. humanity 16
  163. Huxley, Aldous 7
  164. hypermedia 22
  165. i 18
  166. ideas 21
  167. identity 33
  168. images 10
  169. industry 9
  170. information 42
  171. infrastructure 17
  172. innovation 15
  173. interaction 10
  174. interest 10
  175. interfaces 37
  176. intuition 9
  177. invention 10
  178. Irwin, Robert 65
  179. Isaacson, Walter 28
  180. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  181. iteration 13
  182. Ive, Jonathan 6
  183. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  184. Jacobs, Jane 54
  185. Jacobs, Alan 5
  186. Jobs, Steve 20
  187. Jones, Nick 5
  188. Kahn, Louis 4
  189. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  190. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  191. Keith, Jeremy 6
  192. Keller, Jenny 10
  193. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  194. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  195. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  196. Kitching, Roger 7
  197. Klein, Laura 4
  198. Kleon, Austin 13
  199. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  200. Klyn, Dan 20
  201. knowledge 29
  202. Kohlstedt, Kurt 12
  203. Kramer, Karen L. 10
  204. Krishna, Golden 10
  205. Kuma, Kengo 18
  206. language 21
  207. learning 31
  208. life 60
  209. light 32
  210. loneliness 12
  211. love 29
  212. Lovell, Sophie 16
  213. Lupton, Ellen 11
  214. Luu, Dan 8
  215. Lynch, Kevin 12
  216. MacIver, David R. 8
  217. MacWright, Tom 5
  218. Magnus, Margaret 12
  219. making 77
  220. management 14
  221. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  222. Markson, David 16
  223. Mars, Roman 13
  224. material 39
  225. math 16
  226. McCarter, Robert 21
  227. meaning 33
  228. media 16
  229. melancholy 53
  230. memory 29
  231. metaphor 10
  232. metrics 19
  233. microsites 49
  234. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  235. Mills, C. Wright 9
  236. minimalism 10
  237. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  238. Mod, Craig 15
  239. modularity 6
  240. Mollison, Bill 31
  241. morality 8
  242. Murakami, Haruki 21
  243. music 16
  244. Müller, Boris 7
  245. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  246. names 11
  247. Naskrecki, Piotr 5
  248. nature 51
  249. networks 15
  250. Neustadter, Scott 3
  251. Noessel, Christopher 7
  252. notetaking 35
  253. novelty 11
  254. objects 16
  255. order 10
  256. ornament 9
  257. Orwell, George 7
  258. Ott, Matthias 4
  259. ownership 7
  260. Pallasmaa, Juhani 41
  261. Palmer, John 8
  262. patterns 11
  263. Patton, James L. 9
  264. Pawson, John 21
  265. perception 22
  266. perfection 7
  267. performance 17
  268. Perrine, John D. 9
  269. Petroski, Henry 24
  270. photography 20
  271. Pinker, Steven 8
  272. place 14
  273. planning 15
  274. Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 18
  275. poetry 13
  276. politics 9
  277. Pollan, Michael 6
  278. practice 10
  279. problems 31
  280. process 22
  281. production 7
  282. productivity 12
  283. products 21
  284. programming 9
  285. progress 16
  286. Pye, David 42
  287. quality 26
  288. questions 8
  289. Radić, Smiljan 20
  290. Rams, Dieter 16
  291. Rao, Venkatesh 14
  292. reading 17
  293. reality 13
  294. Reichenstein, Oliver 5
  295. religion 12
  296. Rendle, Robin 12
  297. repair 28
  298. research 17
  299. Reveal, James L. 4
  300. Richards, Melanie 3
  301. Richie, Donald 10
  302. Rougeux, Nicholas 4
  303. Rowe, Peter G. 10
  304. Rupert, Dave 4
  305. Ruskin, John 5
  306. Satyal, Parimal 9
  307. Saval, Nikil 13
  308. Sayers, Dorothy 32
  309. Schaller, George B. 7
  310. Schwulst, Laurel 5
  311. science 17
  312. seeing 36
  313. Sennett, Richard 45
  314. senses 11
  315. Seuss, Dr. 14
  316. Shakespeare, William 4
  317. Shorin, Toby 8
  318. silence 9
  319. Silverstein, Murray 33
  320. Simms, Matthew 19
  321. Simon, Paul 6
  322. simplicity 14
  323. Singer, Ryan 12
  324. skill 17
  325. Sloan, Robin 5
  326. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
  327. Smith, Justin E. H. 6
  328. Smith, Rach 4
  329. socializing 7
  330. society 23
  331. software 69
  332. solitude 12
  333. Somers, James 8
  334. Sorkin, Michael 56
  335. sound 14
  336. space 20
  337. Speck, Jeff 18
  338. spirit 10
  339. streets 10
  340. structure 13
  341. Strunk, William 15
  342. Ström, Matthew 13
  343. style 30
  344. Sun, Chuánqí 15
  345. symbols 12
  346. systems 18
  347. Sōetsu, Yanagi 34
  348. Sōseki, Natsume 8
  349. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
  350. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
  351. taste 10
  352. Taylor, Dorian 16
  353. teaching 21
  354. teamwork 17
  355. technology 41
  356. texture 7
  357. thinking 31
  358. Thoreau, Henry David 8
  359. time 55
  360. Tolkien, J.R.R. 6
  361. tools 32
  362. touch 8
  363. transportation 16
  364. Trombley, Nick 45
  365. truth 15
  366. Tufte, Edward 31
  367. Turrell, James 6
  368. typography 25
  369. understanding 33
  370. urbanism 68
  371. ux 100
  372. Victor, Bret 9
  373. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 4
  374. vision 7
  375. visualization 34
  376. Voltaire 4
  377. wabi-sabi 8
  378. walking 23
  379. Wallace, David Foster 33
  380. Wang, Shawn 6
  381. war 7
  382. waste 12
  383. Watterson, Bill 4
  384. Webb, Matt 14
  385. Webb, Marc 3
  386. Weber, Michael H. 3
  387. Wechler, Lawrence 37
  388. whimsy 11
  389. White, E.B. 15
  390. Wirth, Niklaus 6
  391. wisdom 21
  392. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7
  393. Woolf, Virginia 11
  394. words 35
  395. work 81
  396. writing 55
  397. Wurman, Richard Saul 18
  398. www 89
  399. Yamada, Kōun 5
  400. Yamashita, Yuhki 4
  401. Yudkowsky, Eliezer 17
  402. zen 39
  403. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  404. About
  405. RSS Feed
  406. Source

attention

Close
  • From a roving viewpoint

    There is a kind of indeterminacy, quite different in essence from the famous principle of Heisenberg but just as effective in limiting our knowledge of nature, which lies in the fact that we can neither consciously sense nor think of much at any one moment. Understanding can only come from a roving viewpoint and sequential changes of scale of attention.

    Structure, Substructure, and Superstructure
    1. ​​Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction​​
    • attention
    • understanding
  • The most incidental detail

    IMG_6227.jpg

    Black rakuware tea bowl (late sixteenth century), Kyoto, Japan. Freer Sackler Museum of Asian Art.

    For Irwin, the lesson of [the raku tea cups] was twofold: first, their presentation was important, insofar as the ceremony involved a gradual preparation of the audience's aesthetic attention. Then, when the time came to handle the cups, the intimacy of the experience fused visual and tactile sensations into a single continuum. As he also noted:

    he would set on the table this box with a beautiful little tie on it – very Japanese – and you untied it, you opened up the box, he let you do that. And then inside of it was a cloth sack. You took the sack out, and it had a drawstring, and you opened up the drawstring and you reached inside and took out the bowl. By that time, the bowl had you at a level where the most incidental detail – maybe even just a thumb mark – registered as a powerful statement.

    Robert Irwin, Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art
    • zen
    • wabi-sabi
    • ritual
    • tea
    • attention
  • A little dose of time travel

    What’s wild about focused attention is that the act of observation is implicitly timeless. A little dose of time travel. To look closely you must be present. And the more present you are, the more you move outside the boundaries of time.

    Craig Mod, Looking Closely is Everything
    craigmod.com
    • time
    • attention
  • This small internal quaver

    Pay attention now:
    No matter how much you know or learn about syntax, grammar, or rhetoric,
    This small internal quaver, this inner disturbance,
    Is the most useful evidence you'll ever get.
    Someday, you'll be able to articulate what causes it.
    But for now, what's important is to notice it.
    Noticing is always the goal.

    ...the faint vertigo caused by an ambiguity you can't quite detect.

    What matter is what it points to.
    Find out what's causing it and fix it
    Even if you're not sure how.

    Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing
    1. ​​Notes on the Synthesis of Form​​
    • attention
  • Attention requires a cunning passivity.

    Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing
    • attention
  • Over and over again

    "I found a certain strength in sustaining over a period of time my attention on a single point...Like you paint a painting, and then you paint another painting, but each time you take on a whole other mouthful, and you're only able to chew each one just so finely. So anyway, I did just the opposite."

    Which is to say, over the next two years Irwin did nothing but paint the same painting over and over again.

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    • attention
  • Attention over focus

    "When I look at the world now, my posture is not one of focus but rather of attention."

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    • attention
  • Distraction

    To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.

    David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
    • boredom
    • melancholy
    • anxiety
    • attention
    • pain
  • In a stare

    Being in a stare referred to staring fixedly and without expression at something for extensive periods of time. It can happen when you haven't had enough sleep, or too much sleep, or if you've overeaten, or are distracted, or merely daydreaming. It is not daydreaming, however, because it involved gazing at something. Staring at it. Usually straight ahead—a shelf on a bookcase, or the centerpiece on the dining room table, or your daughter or child. But in a stare, you are not really looking at this thing you are seeming to stare at, you are not even really noticing it—however, neither are you thinking of something else. You in truth are not doing anything, mentally, but you are doing it fixedly, with what appears to be intent concentration. It is as if one's concentration becomes stuck the way an auto's wheels can be stuck in the snow, turning rapidly without going forward, although it looks like intense concentration. And now I too do this.

    David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
    • attention
    • thinking
  • Doubling

    Obetrolling didn't make me self-conscious. But it did make me much more self-aware. If I was in a room, and had taken an Obetrol or two with a glass of water and they'd taken effect, I was now not only in the room, but I was aware that I was in the room. In fact, I remember I would often think, or say to myself, quietly but very clearly, 'I am in this room.' It's difficult to explain this. At the time, I called it 'doubling', but I'm still not entirely sure what I meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally aware that I was in the room.

    David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
    • drugs
    • attention
  • Test anxiety

    It was part of a larger discussion about younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. Shackleford's observation was that the real object of the crippling anxiety in 'test anxiety' might well be a fear of the tests' associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread—and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.

    David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
    • anxiety
    • attention
  • This is Water

    A Speech by David Foster Wallace
    www.youtube.com
    1. ​​Everybody worships​​
    1. ​​No words to describe​​
    • life
    • attention
    • society
  • The things that you’re meant to do

    A Quote by Josh Wardle
    slate.com

    I used to work in Silicon Valley, and I’m aware of the things that, especially with games, you’re meant to do with people’s attention. You’re trying to capture as much of people’s attention as you can. So that involves things like endless play, or sending them push notifications, or asking them for sign-up information.

    And philosophically, I enjoy doing the opposite of all those things, doing all the things that you are not meant to do, which I think has bizarrely had this effect where the game feels really human and just enjoyable. And that really resonates with where we’re at right now in the world and with COVID, and then also we’re trying to figure out, what is tech? What has tech become? I think that really resonates with people, and no ads—well, no monetization. People ask me a lot about these things, and it was like, I was literally just making a game for my partner, and I made some decisions that we would like.

    • attention
    • games
    • software
    • design
  • Beauty and compression

    An Article by Scott Alexander
    astralcodexten.substack.com

    The Buddha discusses states of extreme bliss attainable through meditation:

    Secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion.

    ...If you could really concentrate on a metronome, it would be more blissful than a symphony. The jhāna is also a strong contender as a theory of beauty: beauty is that which is compressible but has not already been compressed.

    1. ​​The Abode of the Unsymmetrical​​
    • beauty
    • silence
    • senses
    • attention

    Edited from original text for brevity.

  • The Student, The Fish, and Agassiz

    A Short Story by Samuel H. Scudder & Buster Benson
    busterbenson.com
    1. ​​Fish: a tap essay​​
    2. ​​Looking Closely is Everything​​
    3. ​​One brick​​
    4. ​​Field Notes on Science and Nature​​
    • seeing
    • attention
    • discovery

    Originally by Samuel H. Scudder. Reproduced by Buster Benson for his blog.

  • Looking Closely is Everything

    An Essay by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com
    Image from craigmod.com on 2021-03-02 at 11.45.16 AM.jpeg

    Kambara, detail by detail.

    I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.

    1. ​​A little dose of time travel​​
    1. ​​Pointing at things​​
    2. ​​One brick​​
    3. ​​I recommend eating chips​​
    4. ​​Haven't you noticed?​​
    5. ​​The Student, The Fish, and Agassiz​​
    • interest
    • attention
    • seeing
    • curiosity
  • Fragments of time

    A Quote by Italo Calvino

    Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot live or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

    1. ​​Understanding Architecture​​
    • time
    • writing
    • attention

See also:
  1. time
  2. anxiety
  3. seeing
  4. writing
  5. boredom
  6. melancholy
  7. pain
  8. thinking
  9. drugs
  10. life
  11. society
  12. interest
  13. curiosity
  14. discovery
  15. zen
  16. wabi-sabi
  17. ritual
  18. tea
  19. beauty
  20. silence
  21. senses
  22. understanding
  23. games
  24. software
  25. design
  1. David Foster Wallace
  2. Robert Irwin
  3. Lawrence Wechler
  4. Verlyn Klinkenborg
  5. Craig Mod
  6. Italo Calvino
  7. Samuel H. Scudder
  8. Buster Benson
  9. Scott Alexander
  10. Josh Wardle