Notes on Time
| March 20 |
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| Diagramming Space-Times |
Talking with K. yesterday, something stuck in my mind: Her question and observation about how people reconcile the everyday with the extraordinary. In these moments when the taken-for-granted frames of our lives [untenable as they might be ethically and environmentally] are radically reoriented, how do we [as individuals, communities, societies, species] come to make sense of ourselves in relation to the world?
Amitav Ghosh opens The Great Derangement with a story about a childhood journey down the Padma River when he heard a story about how his forebears had been unmoored by a flood in the 1850s. He steps away from his story-within-a-story to address us:
To this day, when I think of the circumstances that have shaped my life, I remember the elemental force that untethered my ancestors from their homeland and launched them on the series of journeys that preceded, and made possible, my own travels. When I look into my past the river seems to meet my eyes, staring back, as if to ask, Do you recognize me wherever you are?The book makes several arguments. One is that 'Western' literature (which becomes conflated with 'modern' literature) has been remarkably incurious about the nonhuman presences of the world. The world exists only as something to be acted upon and rarely only something that we are asked to recognize. A second argument has to do with the question of time - how we understand ourselves as subjects in time? Ghosh's argument
Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge. To recognize, then, is not the same as an initial introduction. Nor does recognition require an exchange of words: more often than not we recognize mutely. And to recognize is by no means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehension need play no part in a moment of recognition. (The Great Derangement, p. 4)
In 'normal' circumstances [and here a reminder that the 'normal' is always itself a product of disciplinary operations], time is a conveyor belt: Something upon and within which we are carried from the past into a more glorious future. [I'm reminded of Daniel Rosenberg and Sasha Archibald's discussion of timelines in Histories of the Future.] And if we subdivide time - say, to negotiate between the history of a nation, our own personal histories, our own daily and weekly choices - one sits relatively neatly within the container of the other. We're able to manage the day-to-day because the frame of the 'future' remains relatively consistent.
But we're not in normal circumstances. [And as any number of people have been pointing out in relation to climate change, we have not been in normal circumstances for a long time.] And so in these moments, how do we make sense of the temporal rhythms of the everyday in relation to a temporal frame of an uncertain future?
I'm in the process of finishing User Friendly [see previous comments here]. The Afterword closes with eight recommendations for designers [and design-thinkers] to deploy in their work in order to create more user-friendly design.
- Start with the user
- Walk in the user's shoes
- Make the invisible visible
- Build on existing behavior
- Climb the ladder of metaphors
- Expose the inner logic
- Extend the reach
- Form follows emotion
The natural world is filled with feedback... [But] the world of everyday life is so densely layered with information that it can be hard to realize how much information - how much feedback - we have to re-create in the world of design. And yet feedback is what turns any man-made creation into an object that you relate to, one that might evoke feelings of ease or ire, satisfaction or frustration. These are the bones of our relationship with the world around us. (User Friendly, p. 33-34)One of the things that has been working through my head, then, involves trying to make sense of the changing temporalities of feedback. In this moment, what does that look like? What are the metaphors we need to rethink to make sense of this moment, this future?
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