zen tea house (artifacts and meanings)

Many design theories expect a kind of certainty from the designing process, try to somehow distil only the best parts of the design. And even if this is not, in itself, a bad thing, it certainly risks this mistake, of taking the open process of the artefacts and turning it into an independent reality. Of course design is more like cooking than like chemical engineering: you never know exactly how it will taste.

The zen tea-house has a very low door, so that you must be humble and bow down to enter. The low door enforces, then, humility. Damn Japanese!

But no, actually, this is silly. Even the lesser man bows down, and after doing so he is just as likely to do shit as before.

Some people expect that an artefact should (or could, or must) have a single, straightforward, and unambiguous effect on users. And this, for sure, is silly.

the same we do every night

“Gee, Nita, what do you want to do tonight?”
“The same thing we do every night, Baraco — try to take over the world!”

Nita Little thinks contemporary dance, as it creates non-linear pluralistic forms of thinking and feeling and being, can end Capitalism. She wants to take over the world, it would seem. (Of course, her argument is way more complex than this SINGLE LINE can encompass, do i even have to say this?)

Still, in some lights, this is not so difficult to believe at all. (Of course, i do think so because i am a total fanboy, do i even have to say that?)

how to learn a new language

For you to learn a new language you could first memorize a lot of words, then force yourself to use some abstract meaningless grammar rules, then fix the crooked pronunciation this whole thing is bound to distil in you. There are many many schools that follow this (let’s say) strange procedure.

There is a short-cut. The basic mechanism of our use of language is something i will (imprecisely) call “frames of mind”. And the trick is to assume the frame-of-mind of the new language before you understand it.

today’s predicament

The world is a mess. To say that something has to be done is naive and misleading. And still we should think about this predicament, we should be interested in it.

Everything is always falling. The world has always been failing. The nations are always dying and the empires are always ending. If you care to think for an instant that (and how) our society is but a flicker of self-righteousness amidst the flow of history, it’ll give you a new perspective — maybe even new ideas. The risk is you’ll also see that there are paths still open, there are ways we still have to go, and then… Will you be confused?