minimalism
Less, but better
Raw size isn't enough
Omit needless words
Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
Morioka Shoten
Minimum
A Book by John PawsonAdd Less
An Article by Cassidy WilliamsA few people have asked me what I did to make this [website] so fast.
The answer is: nothing.
I just didn't add anything to make it slow.I kept it simple.
The pages are pre-rendered.
The CSS is inlined.
I didn't add unnecessary javascript.
The work was done before you got there.Your websites start fast until you add too much to make them slow. Do you need any framework at all? Could you do what you want natively in the browser? Would doing it without a framework at all make your site lighter, or actually heavier in the long run as you create or optimize what others have already done?
Tanikawa House
A BuildingPhotos of the Tanikawa House, designed by architect Kazuo Shinohara.
Built in 1974, this summer house materializes the act of covering a piece of earth, making it an inhabitation only by means of a roof protecting the dirt soil of the ground. The house lies on a slope in a middle of a wood and grows through an exposed timber frame structure which supports a large pitched roof. Under the roof, a minimal section of the house located on a side hosts some specific living functions concentrated on two floors: a bathroom, a kitchen, a bedroom and a staircase. This section lies in parallel to the main “earth room” (or “summer room”) and overlooks it.
Do We Need This?
An ArticleUltimately this redesign has been a study in less, trying to dig deep and find out what it is I actually want for this site. A momentary visual “wow”, or quality content that is worthy of your attention? I decided on the latter, with less visual clutter it is far harder to try obscure bad or shallow writing behind a veneer of pretty images and effects. Posts may take longer to write but I hope this new design will push towards content that is worthy of your time.
Letters to the Future
The lapse of many years
At this point I wish to emphasize what I believe will ultimately prove to be the greatest purpose of our museum. This value will not, however, be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved. And this is that the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the west, wherever we now work. He will know the proportional constituency of our faunae by species, the relative numbers of each species and the extent of the ranges of species as they exist today.
— Joseph Grinnell, 1910
The Grinnell System
The recording of field notes was common practice for biological surveyors and naturalists generations before Grinnell. His system continues this tradition but is distinguished by its distinctive standardized format. It consists of three sections:
- The journal contains a narrative account describing the study site and summarizing each day’s activities and observations, including a list of species encountered. This section is often peppered with sketches, photographs, or maps.
- The catalog is a sequential record of all voucher specimens collected, each with a unique field number and the information needed for the specimen’s museum tag, such as its sex, mass, breeding status, and standard body measurements.
- Species accounts are species-specific summaries of information and observations, gradually accumulated over multiple days at a site or across multiple sites, that eventually grow to detailed summaries of physical description, seasonal behaviors, microhabitat associations, and other characteristics.
Separating the notebook in this fashion allows each section to have its own context-specific structure and format.
Jim's system
From the earliest days of my fieldwork until now, throughout a given day I jotted notes, typically in pencil, into a small, spiral-bound pocket notebook, remembering the admonition not to trust one’s memory but to record observations as continually as possible. I then transcribes these notes into my handwritten journal in the evenings on the best of days or every few days when an intense field effort allowed.
From 2000 onward, I would still takes pencil notes in a small pocket notebook in the field, but I transcribes these into a word-processor document with margins set for the size of our field note pages. I combined this document with my field catalog for a particular trip and eventually both would be bound in the same manner as standard, handwritten field notes.
This approach had the advantage of producing both an archival paper copy as well as an electronic copy. It was also easy to intersperse specialized maps and digital photographs, which had become the norm by this time, throughout the journal text.
John's system
I have two field notebooks: a “raw" notebook and my formal Grinnellian notebook.
In the field, I take all my raw notes in a waterproof notebook using a fine-point permanent pen (or pencil when its raining). The entries have virtually no structure other than the date at the top of (almost) every page.
At the end of the day, I transcribe the notes into my Grinnellian journal as if I were writing a latter to a colleague.
Record them all
You can’t tell often in advance which observations will prove valuable. Do record them all!
— Joseph Grinnell, 1908
Recommendations for field notes
Being an end-user of someone else’s field notes certainly gives you insight into the benefits of good note-taking skills. Our experiences as end-users and creators of archival field notes lead us to a few specific recommendations:
(1) Don’t get bogged down in the details of format or style.
Rules are counterproductive if they prevent a researcher from taking field notes in the first place.
You will get more return by focusing on your content than by refining your formatting.
(2) Compose your notes as if you were writing a letter to someone a century in the future.
Writing for an external audience requires you to be more explicit in your descriptions and to take less knowledge for granted. Avoid the use of abbreviations, symbols, and other shortcuts that only you will understand.
Ask yourself: How would you describe this to someone over the phone?
(3) It is better to spend five minutes writing the important details than twenty minutes writing the trivial ones.
Field notes
Field notes example.
Camp's notes
Grinnell-era field notes example, Charles L. Camp.