To know the place for the first time We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding The Dark Tower timecyclesendingexploration
Perilous to be sure It would not be clear where the boundary of sanctioned speech lay until an attempt had been made to cross it and that attempt had failed. Such efforts Wittgenstein regarded with benevolence. He treated them as reconnaissance expeditions, perilous to be sure, but well worth the effort expended on them. H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change wordsexplorationspeech
The vast open seas We didn't have Google in the early days. Other search engines like Lycos, Excite and Northern Lights did exist but were nowhere near as efficient as modern search engines. Finding something you were interested in was not as simple as typing a few words and getting to that information in one click. No, the web was much more of an adventure. It was a place that you wandered to discover new areas, like exploring the vast open seas. A new virtual space that lead to all kinds of strange, interesting, exciting places. This is what the web was like, at least, in our collective imagination. Parimal Satyal, Rediscovering the Small Web explorationwww
The Alchemist A Novel by Paulo Coelho en.wikipedia.org My own beauty reflectedThicker booksTo find God in the seminaryWhat others want them to beThe soul of the universe+25 More The alchemists in their mixings destinyloveadventureexploration
Don’t Play It Like the Flute An Article by Matthias Ott matthiasott.com Don’t play it like the flute. Play it as if it was the wind whistling through the desert dunes. No matter what you love to create, there is something to be learned from the way Hans Zimmer approached the Dune score. We are all striving to create work that is novel, innovative, memorable, and inspiring. To get there, however, we tend to focus on getting things right, on avoiding mistakes, on “being professional”. Yes, it is important to have the commitment, dedication, and attention to detail of a professional. But being right? That will only take you so far. What is much more important is to approach the problem in front of you with curiosity and an open mind. With an urge to explore what can be found beyond the ordinary, beyond the right way of doing things. If you want to create something that nobody has come up with yet, it is important that you try out all the crazy ideas others are afraid to try, that you build prototypes, improvise, and freely play with the materials and the technologies you have at hand. musiccreativitynoveltyexplorationcuriosity
Psychogeography A Definition by Guy Debord en.wikipedia.org Psychogeography is an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting". It was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as: "The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." "A total dissolution of boundaries between art and life." "A whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities...just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape." Who the fuck is Guy Debord?20 Minutes in ManhattanThe driftRaindrops leaving an erratic trail walkingcitiesurbanismplayexploration
“Design” is now “Product” An Article by Dorian Taylor dorian.substack.com Design has very little to do with what tools or methodologies you use, or what your job title is, or what you have a degree in, or even anything like “creativity”; design is about your relationship to constraints. Rather: to what extent are you defining constraints rather than just obeying them? Design is about taking a universe of possibilities and converging onto exactly one outcome. Being handed a set of constraints which you treat like immutable laws of physics (because many of them are) and solving within that envelope is what engineering is. To wit: what most designers are doing most of the time is actually a form of engineering, and engineers are always doing at least some design. This is because genuine design—the power to define constraints—is a privileged political position within an organization, and not everybody can occupy it. In other words, the “seat at the table” comes first. Design is Steve Jobs infamously dropping an iPod prototype into his fish tank, pointing at the bubbles coming out and yelling at his staff to make it thinner. It doesn’t matter what your title is; Jobs is the designer in that scenario. Steve Jobs designengineeringconstraints