Thomas Kuhn: The Essential Tension
Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. 1977
Chapter 9, 1959 Conference Speech
Kuhn seems to say in a very long winded way that things are going well in academia. It may be stodgy, but innovation happens. The tension between thinking inside the box to get things done, to get degrees, to survive, and the thinking outside the box is good. Perhaps it is like the oil painter who spends most of their life painting inside the box of the frame, while also trying to do something new or unique. Or the script writer to follows the Hollywood format, and still is able to do new storytelling???
I’m not sure, but I think you need a defined box to be able to think outside of, and in turn change the box that others try and think outside of.
I liked his thoughts about the different scientists, applied, pure and inventor. This is tension, perhaps in the end economic? Few people are talented enough to ignore the ladders they climb to secure their bread and butter. We many want to revolutionize the Web, but we may also take a decade to make a small fortune in the market like the Wikipedia founder, or work on a PhD along the way as a safety like the Google founders.
The postscript of this piece was really good. I think he’s saying, in very funny way, that the scientists at this convention should do more basic science in order to get to the point where they can be more inventive?
Book Excerpt: Convergences
Octavio Paz, Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship, 1973
Heavy foreign writing to me. Vauge, and needing examples. For me sometimes right on, and also right off…with a lot of artspeak in between that I didn’t really grasp, but more gazed at like a piece of art I don’t get and has a confusing plack.
The “profane and the scared” division would be nice to have a rough date. We have a long history of art, i.e. cave paintings for storytelling, but also, one could guess, for expression of an ancient person in a cave alone needing to do something they could not probably explain.
“The see the celestial harmony was to hear it, and to hear it was to understand it.” How? Early astronomers didn’t play music to record their findings. I’m sort of lost here…
I liked his opinions on the modern religion of art going “round and round in circles.”
To me, Marshall Mcluhan’s quote that “art is anything you can get away with” is most to the point. The people who view the art that the artists and curators and critics have filtered to a manageable size, they are the test. They may not get every piece, and they may miss the point of works that end up to be famous later, but if the unwashed masses give bad reviews to the entire museum or movement, there’s probably something wrong. Art that is in pubic view, for me is by people, for people.
“The decoration of the craft object ordinarily has no function whatsoever,” missed a point I feel. The function of decoration was to provide pleasure in the user sometimes. The beautiful handles of excellent hutches were meant to not only work, but to be nice to look at and to communicate quality and pride. The slick functionality of a modern stainless steel stoves is also slick looking, and easy to clean. When industrial functionality goes too far, time quickly makes it ugly, so another function of decoration done right is to excel in the tests of time. Craftsmanship can also be duplicated successfully, e.g. Porsche cars, and iPods, who’s prototypes were made by hand. I do agree with his statement that “craftsmanship is at a midpoint”
On technology Paz writes, “it makes things uniform, but it does not unify.” This was pre Web. I wonder what he would think about the way artists are using the Web now? And I don’t think technology only “levels the differences between cultures and national styles.” It is also now preserving and broadcasting them. Technology now is the best chance we have of recording history, not “putting an end to history itself.” What about Wikipedia?
“Nobody learns from someone else’s experience” would be hard to stand by in the face of the Web site Instructables.com I’ve been using. On Instructables craftsmen and women not only make things, sometimes beautiful, sometimes inventive, they then tell everyone on the Web HOW they made them and their experience. For free. In turn, Google favors the site because of its low commercial motivations and spreads the ideas and experiences.
I think Paz would like the Web.
Distinguishing Concepts: Lexicons of Interactive Art and Architecture
Usman Haque
The preamble by the editor contradicted the article’s point. The editor says Haque will “sort the wheat from the chaff” of interactive vocabulary. Hugue on the other hand says basically, “The purpose of this exercise is not so much to pin down nostalgic meanings of words or to provide an authoritative reference guide, but rather to demonstrate that there are some quite interesting and fertile conceptual frameworks in the field of interactive architectural design that can be obscured or revealed by the language we intuitively use.”
I think the author got it right.
4dsocial. Interactive Design Elements
Distinguishing Concepts, Lexicons Of Interactive Art and Architecture
Architectural Design, July/August 2007
I think the editor got the intro wrong on this article. It wasn’t so much separating the “wheat and the chaff,” as he stated, but more as the author said, “demonstrate that athere are some quite interesting and fertile conceptual frameworks…” The intro made me expect actual defintions vs. the rather chaff ridden discussions that ensued.
Commons and Reactive were good words to learn more about.
Reading, “The Nature Of Order”
Alexander C. 1980-2002
Original version seemed to be written in 1980 according to the copyright. The cars in the photos looked that old. This effected my opinion of the piece due to the tone of history in some of the photos where you could see cars, haircuts, signs, etc.
Looking at the photos I was in agreement with the writer in terms of “liking” most of the photos on the left v.s the right. My reasons were simpler though, in contrast to the writer’s often flowery new-age architecture speak. He seems to push hard to make his ideas real, to make the attributes he was trying to define mean a great deal, to define entire new paradigms. But when I looked at the photos my preferences felt more guided by evolutionary/biological factors somewhere along the lines of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. I started with food, shelter and safety. Was their cover in the photos? Could I run and hide? Was there an outlet, or was I trapped? Was there hope for water to drink? Did I understand what I was looking at so I could safely navigate through it?
My other observation was that stark, harsh, right angle, blank walls, are just not humane, as he more or less says. We like round, natural, curvy things with imperfections. At least in terms of our environment outside. Inside, some people like the clean, modern white lines of new fancy apartments with carpet and steel. But even those keep away from drab dirty colors that could remind one of stagnate water and go for clean, which is a basic need. Other’s like wood, which is logical. Even the cheapest houses often have painted wood, or something rounded, around doorways to soften and protect the edges we pass though, almost like vestiges of caves.
At times near the end the writer seems to skirt around spiritualism. He almost invokes God when he talks about things “greater” and “more profound.” The author is trying to define a grand new “way,” but I think human nature has already done that. People need safety, water, food, and places to run and hide. Around the world people often don’t have a choice. But through it all I think you could find a general mapping to basic needs. There’s back doors or fire escapes if possible. We like plants, yards, fish tanks something natural. There are round places to sit, places to put stuff, a fondness for wood and other curved things. Outside, we like a little disorder, like the author points out. Computer order is cold because we are not computers. Our bodies are usually not symmetrical. Big shiny identical buildings, rows of identical houses, identical windows in skyscrapers, are not places we love to go. We go because we work there, there’s food, power, money there. But when we go on vacations, we at least want a balcony on our skyscraper hotel room, and a curved big bathtub. And if we can, the ideal stills seem to be a hammock by a jungle hut on a temperate beach. Talk about basic! 100,000 years and all we’ve added to our jungle by the beach is safety, food delivery and mosquito netting!
The most difficult shot for me were the two office building lobbies. One factor is that one is a long shot, the other, on the right, a medium shot. I go with the left shot, but it’s close. I think the negative feeling from the photo on the right has to do with the back of the woman. We are sneaking up on her, which is dramatic. She’s in our sights, in the center of the shot. He doesn’t mention that. The shot on the left is almost like looking out the mouth of a large cave. The shots of country roads and hills were my favorite. Cutting though a mountain is cool, like a skyscraper, but I don’t want to go there in vacation.
To conclude, very interesting. But I think he forgets how close we are to monkeys in our basic needs and instincts about shelter and safety.
Reading, Week 7
Coming To Our Senses by Neil deGrasse Tyson:
I agree with the article’s presmise that we have incredible senses by some measures, and laughably crude senses when compared to space telescopes, mars probes, dark matter sensors, microscopes, x-rays, MRIs etc. So we are in a sense amazing to ourselves in our environment and when compared to other animals perhaps. Other animals may have sharper specific senses, but we seem to be an “all in one” machine that senses a lot of things fairly well, vs. some things really well.
Ultimately this brings up the salient point that as we evolve we will use machines more and more to sense the world around us. This “world” will actually be the universe. Our probes go farther, with more ease, then a bunch of monkeys in a tin can puttering though space. By this measure, our machine sensors have a much more likely chance of stumbling on to “first contact” with extraterrestrial life. They are our eyes, ears, and mouths. We should be sensitive to how we build these machines.
Reading, “Intro to Ergonomics”
I was surprised that there was little mention of how psychological stress can negatively effect the back, and how psychological treatments can help (See meta study results.)
Also of interest:
- “85% of low back pain has no identifiable cause” !
- The negative effects of age on the back, especially after 30, and the re-stabilazation after 60, albeit with less flexibility.
- Slouching and leaning back may in fact be better for you.
- Keeping your body mass supported by bone vs soft tissues being good
- Importance being not on “whether we stand or sit, but how”
- The importance of movement, walking, breaks.
- Avoiding early morning leaning forward work
- Crossing arms and folding legs while sitting helps relieve stress on the lower body.
v1.0 Nov. 2007
