The home as background to video conferencing

The home as background to video conferencing 

As most people, I've generally enjoyed the tasks of the interior design of my own home. Arranging activities relative to spaces, building elements and furniture is a recurring issue, even when nothing changes in the activities or the building. Sometimes it is because of new insights, either from personal experience or from what others have done, sometimes it reflects new opportunities for change and sometimes it's purely due to boredom with the existing situation. 

Designing my own home is obviously from my own perspective and that of those who share it with me. I consider everything with respect to my actions and their needs, my interactions with family members and guests, and imagine the situation as I (and they) would view it: from the inside out. The external viewer is sometimes also taken into account (after all, I live in a practically glass house in the Netherlands) but their perspective is limited to what they could see in the garden or through the windows. 

The Covid-19 measures have changed this. Most of my professional contacts have become virtual, including through video conferencing. This means that many people now see the interior of my home from a perspective opposite to mine. While previously I viewed the arrangement of my computers from my vantage point, now on the computer screens I also see what the others see behind me: the photographs on the shelves, the kitchen sink and many other details from an often unflattering perspective. 

Many have taken action to remedy that and not just by using virtual backgrounds. They chose their workplace at home with care, so as to show a safe, neutral or attractive part of their home life. Some have separate places for working and for video conferencing. Quite a few feel that their privacy is invaded, while others make use of the opportunity to impress. For me, the interesting part is how strange sometimes my own home appears from the perspective of the video conferencing camera. It is as if it reveals things that are relegated to a fuzzy background in my own perception, arguably because I move and sit differently oriented to the camera in a device I'm viewing. 

The variable third dimension

The variable third dimension 

I've been rereading Gibson's The ecological approach to visual perception, enjoying his relentless debunking of many things we accept unquestioningly, mainly because everybody accepts, believes and propagates them. I've grown rather wary of statements that include "of course", especially if people listen to them and just nod in acceptance. Automatically I make a mental note to examine them more critically.
One of the concepts Gibson attacks with conviction is the third dimension in visual perception. He suggests that thinking of depth as the third dimension comes from erroneously believing that what we perceive is a two-dimensional projection, just like in a camera. He points out how unnatural it is to analyse visual perception with such projections, while in reality we constantly change our viewpoint by moving our heads and bodies. One could therefore say that once again metaphors and implementation mechanisms distort our thinking and cloud our understanding.
In architecture the third dimension is different: not depth but height. The difference actually stresses the similarity of both cases: both start from a two-dimensional projection as the reality. The floor plan is one of my favourite representations, a marvel of overview and economy. However, any design described by a floor plan is three dimensional. What the floor plan describes is just some aspects of the design. The rest should be in the designer's mind or other, complementary representations.
That's why I feel inclined to roll my eyes every time someone claims that this or that adds the third dimension to drawings or designs, that it liberates architecture from two-dimensional tyrannies. Such claims merely reveal fundamental misconceptions and lack of understanding of one's tools. That's the real tyrannies.