The whole and the parts

The whole and the parts 

Cycling through the Dutch countryside, wondering why the flocks of Canadian geese haven't left yet, despite the time of the year, despite the temperature that has been around the freezing point for some time now, I listen to a podcast of The infinite monkey cage about ghosts. Its enjoyable but predictable, until Neil deGrasse Tyson remarked that we shouldn't be talking about bodies without heads but about heads without bodies; not "off with his head" but "off with his body". It's a clever remark: there are too many prejudiced embodied in our languages and our ways of thinking. We know that the head is the critical part of a person but we insist on talking about it as if it were a secondary limb. We equate the body with the person rather than seeing it as an extension of the head. Looking around, I have to acknowledge that similar biases exist everywhere, mostly in favour of the interfaces through which we interact with things: computer screens are the computer (especially now that many respond to touch); the tabletop is often the table. But with bodies and heads, it's different and more intriguing. Is it just that the biggest of the two dominates or does it have with old ideas like Plato's belief that the head is just a blood cooler? I think it's more than that. We don't often fall in love with just a head but falling in love with just a body is rather common. In the domain of intricate relations between the whole and the parts, bodies occupy a particular position.

Ginnels and snickets

Ginnels and snickets

It's fascinated when words become quite specific, when they relate to particular variations of things widely familiar, especially variations of type and context. For example, one can find narrow, pedestrian alleyways between the back yards of houses in many countries. In the Netherlands it's through such alleyways that one often enters his back yard with a bicycle in tow . In contrast to streets, these alleyways usually have no name; despite being familiar to the whole neighbourhood, one can only refer them by reference to the houses they separate.

In the north of England, these alleyways are called ginnels or snickets and I cannot hear these words without immediately thinking of long vistas, strictly defined by brick walls, fences and sheds under clouded skies - images from films and television dramas. Reversely, when some Northern drama visits such stereotypes and the words immediately come to my mind, making me rather proud that I know such terms, despite having never lived in the north of England.

Rituals of access

Rituals of access

In Andrea Camilleri's Paper Moon, following frustrating experience with a secure bank entrance, inspector Montalbano considers writing a text on the ceremony of access and how it is intended to make you feel secure while there is no guarantee that you actually are. This is something more and more people realising with various security measures, including the demanding ones at airports. However, such rituals predate current security issues and are built in the affordances many entrances. For example, revolving doors are intended to restrict air flow and reduce drafts between indoors and outdoors. They also regulate pedestrian flow, making us slow down and go in or out in small numbers, ensuring that we've paid a ticket or that we don't go in the wrong direction (as with turnstiles). They manage to constrain our behaviour so effectively that we seldom rebel against their tyranny; we accept them as part of the experience and even welcome the adjustment they offer. When I see unobtrusive yet major design successes, I realise how natural the built environment can be.

Publish or perish

Publish or perish

Literature reviews are getting harder by the day, not only because there are too many papers published in scientific journals and conference but also because most of them tell little if anything new. The pressure to publish regularly and the constraints journals impose in the name of proper research are trivialising publication. I'd rather have people publish one significant thing every five years than cut it up into ten pieces so that two papers can be publish every year.

Another thing is that we shouldn't equate publication with research. Publications and citations are useful indications but essentially proxies of one's work. Research is about getting to know stuff and many times it amounts to replicating what others have already done in order to fully understand it. How does one measure this deep, thorough understanding? Review papers could be a way but journals do not encourage them. Finally, one should not underestimate reading: big chunks of research time go into reading - not just browsing the abstracts and conclusions in order to collect citations for one's own papers but proper reading, with full comprehension. That's not just a preamble to doing one's research, it's a core research activity and performance.

Art or science

Art or science 

Is architecture (or design, in general) an art or a science? I've had the feeling that this was a rather unproductive debate long before I came across the suggestion that both art and science are just two facets of the same human intellectual attempt at improvement, exploration and understanding (e.g. in Lisa Jardine's work) or unifying approaches to human cognition through viewpoints like information processing or problem solving (e.g. by Herbert Simon). My key problem with such lofty debates is that they are exactly sidetracking us from fundamental issues in our cognition and history towards superficial demarcations that simply confine our thinking within conventions and arbitrary goals. I'd rather spend my time trying to unravel the former issues than servicing supportive silos. One doesn't get thanks for doing so but the satisfaction that comes from even minor revelations can be great.

Wind farms and Futurism

Wind farms and Futurism 

The aesthetic arguments against wind farms, voiced mainly in artistic circles, amaze me. That people would single out wind turbines among the ugliness that surrounds us is puzzling and rather hypocritical, especially when supported by comparisons with other machines that are supposedly beautiful, like locomotives. Even worse, the beauty of locomotives and the like is chiefly by reference to what Futurists used to preach.

I hear such arguments and want to scream at them, tell them that they're just reiterating what Futurists had said 100 years ago, that they lack the critical capacity to understand and interpret it for our times. I'm certain that if those Futurists were alive today, they would be ecstatic about wind turbines. Just the idea that electricity is being generated and flowing in them would bring them to the brink of an orgasm; the mere size of turbines would fascinate them; the dramatic movement of the blades would enthuse them; and the repetition of turbines in artificial ridges on top of a tamed landscaped would probably form the ultimate example of the triumph of technology. Yes, I'm sure Futurists would be fervent proponents of wind farms primarily on aesthetic grounds.

Architecture and criminality

Architecture and criminality 

Almost a year ago, in an article for the Sunday Times, the then UK Prime Minister David Cameron (a lot can happen in less than a year) described sink estates as concrete slabs dropped form on high, brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals and drug dealers, adding that decades of neglect have led to gangs and antisocial behaviour. The solution he proposed was to knock the worst estates down and redevelop them with private capital (I guess that some estates are at prime locations). The government would inject 140 million pounds to rehouse occupants and tear up planning rules to speed up the process (every time I hear about speeding up planning and design processes I think it's a great way to escape scrutiny).

I heard about it back then on The News Quiz. Miles Jump who was presenting it commented: "Of course, that's what drives most people to crime: architecture".