Monday, December 9, 2013

Attention Theft Alert

I recently spent a most delightful and productive morning in a Parisian coffee shop. Delightful and productive mostly because, as the waiter informed me, the room I chose to sit in did not allow the use of computers or telephones. I might have already started to get up for another one of their lovely rooms, when I decided to ease myself back in the wide wooden chair, by a vegetal wall. So I rearranged my notebook, magazine, and article and, half-amused, half-curious, set out to see how long I could go without distractions. (Gloria Mark’s research shows the average we can ‘go without’ is 11 minutes).

The answer: two and a half hours spent reviewing a paper, writing for my journal, and enjoying a short story. It was quiet around me, and it helped me create some quiet space in my head as well. All of it made it easier to listen to what I really thinking, identify how I felt. It is not that I have a difficult time spending interruption-free mornings or afternoons. It is that the interruption-free time was imposed by the rules of a public place. So I owe the thought- and emotion-rich morning to the good people who decided to restrict people’s use of electronic devices in one room in their coffee shop.

So when a few days later I discovered Malcolm McCullough’s book Ambient Commons I knew just how much I had been robbed by needless interruptions and meaningless information plastered all around public spaces. McCullough ponders the consequences of what he calls ‘attention theft’ for our lives as dwellers of information-rich and visually polluted places. He argues about the need to tame the technologically mediated urbanism into a human place that allows for attention, surprise, boredom, insight. Places such as the lovely coffee shop on Seine’s bank are as necessary as fresh air, and they are a natural response to surroundings invaded by information media.

I am now trying to compile a list of such oases in the midst of the big city.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Lost stories: On the power of taking a historical perspective

I read today a great article on the Lost Stories in the Information Design History by  GK Van Patter, one of the co-founder of Humantific's (a Sense Making and Change Making Consultancy) website.

The article presents the work of an early visual thinker, yet mostly unknown: William Brinton (1880-1957) and his book Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts published in 1917, which includes the main principles and methods used up to now in infograpics and data visualization. Not only the work of Brinton is very interesting for those interested in visual thinking and infographics, but what I really appreciate was the historical perspective taken in this post.

Van Patter writes: "Some historical landmarks are well known to many, while others remain off most radar screens, especially to new generations. Particularly online, we notice a general lack of historical awareness and crediting in many current data visualization, design and innovation-related discussions." 

From this, he concludes:
"At Humantific, we have significant interest in the forgotten stories, lost stories, and off-the-beaten-path landmarks of sensemaking and changemaking history, as they have the potential to inform present day understanding significantly."

I was very excited to see this approach embraced by a consultancy as it is very close to the perspective we took to investigate the role of writing in our book, but a perspective which does not always seem relevant to all, in particular in a world where "not everyone wants to acknowledge that each generation tends to learn from, build on, or divert from the previous generation’s ideas and output."