Humans are spatial creatures Humans are spatial creatures. We experience most of life in relation to space. We sit in a circle with our family. We drive down the left side of the road in Ireland and try to stay in our lane. We ride scooters down a path along the water. We sculpt a human body out of stone. We follow signs to our train. We walk, through arches, or on crosswalks beside bike lanes, or to follow our brother across a bridge. We position our camera to frame the shot while our friend leans out over a balcony. We sense ourselves in space in relation to all of the other objects in our environment. And this is powerful knowledge that we've left out of lots of software. In fact, while most obvious in 3D, this thinking does work outside of just three-dimensional software. Almost any software can use spatial concepts to become easier to understand. John Palmer, Spatial Interfaces body
The 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. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses Architecture Without Architects bodytraditionhistory
A simple pleasure that comes from just using it People have a sense of warmth and coolness, a thermal sense like sight or smell, although it is not normally counted in the traditional list of our five senses. As with all our other senses, there seems to be a simple pleasure that comes from just using it, letting it provide us with bits of information about the world around, using it to explore and learn, or just to notice. There is a basic difference, however, between our thermal sense and all of our other senses. When our thermal sensors tell us an object is cold, that object is already making us colder. If, on the other hand, I look at a red object it won't make me grow redder, nor will touching a bump object make me bumpy. Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture sensesbody
Half-winged, half-imprisoned The contrast between man’s ideological capacity to move at random through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical limitations, is the origin of all human tragedy. It is this contrast between power and prostration that implies the duality of human existence. Half winged—half imprisoned, this is man! Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook ideasbody
(an architectural stem cell that might transform itself into any organ for living) Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan euphonybodyarchitecturespace
We have turned our faces towards the future During the modern era, we have even changed our bodily position in relation to the flow of time; the Greeks understood that the future came from behind their backs and the past receded away in front of their eyes, but we have turned our faces towards the future, and the past is disappearing behind our backs. Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture timebody
In our bodies We tend to think of our memory as a cerebral capacity, but the act of memorizing engages our entire body. Remembering is not solely a mental even; it is also an act of embodiment and bodily projection. Memories are not only hidden in the electrochemical processes of the brain; they are also stored in our skeletons, muscles, senses, and skin. Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture memorybody
The same material as the sun I have to apologize. I was born with a disfigurement where my head is made of the same material as the sun. It makes it impossible for you to look directly at me. It has always been this way. Shane Carruth, Upstream Color bodysurrealism
A Brief Rant An Essay by Bret Victor worrydream.com Like, just a post complaining that screens should be better designtechnologywwwinteractionbody
The body image A Quote The body image is informed fundamentally from haptic and orienting experiences early in life. Our visual images are developed later on, and depend for their meaning on primal experiences that were acquired haptically. Metaphors We Live ByGods of the WordThe Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses bodymeaning
Matter versus Materials: A Historical View An Essay from A Search for Structure by Cyril Stanley Smith Atoms and aggregatesAesthetically motivated curiosityWhose eyes had seen and whose fingers had feltThe alchemists in their mixingsA holograph of itself+3 More
Atoms and aggregates I see science reversing the trend toward atomistic explanation that has been so triumphant in the last 400 years, and I predict a more human future based on the symbiosis of exact knowledge (which is by its very nature limited) and experience. ...Matter cannot be understood without a knowledge of atoms; yet it is now becoming evident that the properties of materials that we enjoy in a work of art or exploit in an interplanetary rocket are really not those of atoms but those of aggregates...It is not stretching the analogy much to suggest that the chemical explanation of matter is analogous to using an identification of individual brick types as an explanation of Hagia Sophia. The edifice from which they came architecturescience
Whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt Aristotle’s 18 qualities of homoeomerous bodies that he chose to explain in detail in his Meteorologica, are just those fine points of behavior that would be noticed in a workshop. They are: solidifiable meltable softenable by heat softenable by water flexible breakable fragmentable capable of taking an impression plastic squeezable ductile malleable fissile curable viscous compressible combustible capable of giving off fumes This redundant list of properties is not the neat classification of a philosopher. It reads more as if it were based on a conversation with a workman whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt the intricacies of the behavior of materials. craftmaterialtexturecollections
The alchemists in their mixings Many wonderful things must have been seen by the alchemists in their mixings. The Alchemist euphonycuriosity
A holograph of itself All [physical properties of matter] derive from the different patterns of the interaction of electrons and photons within the fields of the positively charged atomic nuclei, stabilized in a particular morphology by the interaction of the levels themselves. Matter is a holograph of itself in its own internal radiation. physics
To worship at the shrine of mathematics The new [physics-based] viewpoint is so potent that it has perhaps, caused too many metallurgists to forsake their partially intuitive knowledge of the nature of materials to worship at the shrine of mathematics, a trend reinforced by the curious human tendency to laud the more abstract. mathabstraction
What the advancing interface leaves behind I see in the complex structure of any material—biological or geological, natural or artificial—a record of its history, a history of many individual events each of which did predictably follow physical principles. Nothing containing more than a few parts appears full panoplied, but it grows. And as it grows, the advancing interface leaves behind a pattern of structure perfection or imperfection which is both a record of historical events and a framework within which future ones must occur. From the head of Jove historygrowthstructure
A realization that this leaves out something essential Nothing so fundamental lies in the realm of concern to us aggregate humans, where the need is, now, for the study of real complexity, not idealized simplicity. In every field except high-energy physics on one hand, and cosmology on the other, one hears the same. The immense understanding that has come from digging deeper to atomic explanations has been followed by a realization that this leaves out something essential. In its rapid advance, science has had to ignore the fact that a whole is more than the sum of its parts. knowledgecomplexityholism