Weeknotes 3 January 2020

By solle on 06/01/2020 — 1 min read

The human is the darkest machine/

Some people have referred to me in the past as a bit of a maverick, but thanks very much Cummings, not that type of maverick/

“The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud above the toilet bowl, and then flush them away.” Olga Tokarczuk (Drive your plow over the bones of the dead)/

The best camera is the one in your hand, on. No cognition required. Even the effort to turn something on has become too slow. (Remembering all those photographs I didn’t take.)/

Poor sentences seem as though they are looking for an invitation. Good sentences aren’t/

When you are under 50, you are definitely closer to childhood than death. You clamber up things, you go up things, you peer up things and over things and down things and you don’t think about it or worry about it too much. When you are over 50 your relationship with your childhood changes and suddenly clambering up things and peering over things seems far darker, more meaningful and consequential/

Generosity and gratitude. Unexpected acts of generosity especially in places where disparity of incomes is at its most acute can still be met with genuine surprise. “I have no words” a man’s response today to receiving a tip in an underground parking lot which he obviously sits in day after day with the sole purpose of giving a sense of ‘safety’ rather than actual ‘safety’. (Senses of safety is a whole other industry beyond actual safety.)/

The most generous people I know are the best role models. Keep the generous people close/

A strong preference for a home is that there is a view. For instance, a street passing from one side of a window to the other, so that activity is regularly moving across the frame of vision. People walking is ideal. The sound of it is less important/

Even the smallest thing you do has a consequence. “I want to show that small can be large, and large small, it is just the standpoint from which we judge that changes, and every concept loses its validity, and all our human gestures lose their validity.” Hannah Hoch/

I suppose that every imaginative artist has some recurring obsessions/

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I am a user centred design leader working across senior design leadership teams and user centred design operations. I work across a wide range of digital services within the public, private and not for profit sectors.