Almost all of us have a sense of awe when we see a magnificent sunset or walk through a dense forest. We have the same feeling when we visit a great cathedral or see a work of art. There is something about the colors, the complexity, the arrangement, the variation, that strikes us deeply but…
One of the things that surprised Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi when he was doing surveys about pleasure and enjoyment was the universal agreement on what constituted an enjoyable experience. He found that people from all cultures, all stages of life shared the same sense of what made an activity truly enjoyable. Moreover, widely differing activities from art…
If we think about structure and space in different ways than we are accustomed to, we start to see that structures that we previously regarded as inanimate actually do have degrees of life. In fact there is not a clear distinction between things that are alive and things that are not alive. It is actually…
If we want to build structures that feel alive we will have to get past the idea that “form follows function,” a mechanistic notion that mainly considers physics, and start thinking of life and order as essential properties of structure. This new view will take into consideration the wholeness of the structure, not just how…
All space and matter has some degree of life in it. This is the proposition that Christopher Alexanader makes in The Nature of Order, Book One, the Phenomenon of Life. This life is observable and testable. There seems to be a nearly universal agreement among people when they see particular works of architecture, art, elements…
Between 1972 and 1981 patients having the same type of gall bladder surgery were studied to see whether or not natural settings had an impact on recovery. Twenty three patients had a window with a view of nature. Twenty three patients had window with.a view of a brick wall. Those with the view of nature…
A study by Texas A&M found that interaction with plants and green spaces had demonstrated benefits across six quality of life constructs. The paper gathers research on an even broader array of benefits, including: One of the undelying focsuses of the paper is how green space can be incorporated into architecture and ubran design in…
Having a connection to green space can have powerful benefits for one’s physical and mental health. For instance, patients with a view of nature have better outcomes than patients with a view of a wall. Interaction with plants can help to improve all six quality of life areas: Because of these benefits an increasing number…
Anne-Laure Le Cunff observes that the French have a phrase cultiver son jardin intérieur – or caring for your interior garden. It’s a way of saying that the mind is like a garden. There is more to the comparison than simple metaphor. The garden is one of humanity’s oldest creations. And there seems to be…
Two ways to go about knowledge sharing in the workplace are through narrated work or through observable work. The concepts are similar but there are important differences. Observable Work = Work in Progress Keeping your work-in-progress and other files on a company shared drive is one way to make your work observable. People can not…
The process of picking a topic and finding supporting research is a trap. At the best you engage in a high degree of confirmation bias, seeing only the information that supports your premise. I remember in college many times writing a paper only to find near the end that the research was pointing in a…
Niklas Luhmann observes that in order to think in any constructive way he must write down his thoughts. This seems to be one of the main purposes of his Zettelkasten note-taking system – capturing thoughts and refine them by writing them down, reflecting on them, changing them. In addition to capturing thoughts in his notes,…
When you first start on a writing project you don’t know what the structure of your project will be. As you do research, collect ideas, and clarify your thoughts, the structure will emerge. Using a tool like Tinderbox lets you test your ideas and see what kind of structure provides the best fit for your…
A traditional story or novel is made up of crises or decision points where one or more characters determine the eventual outcome. In Jose Luis Borges’ 1941 story “The Garden of Forking Paths” the main character travels to a small village with winding streets which promise to take him to a labyrinth. This labyrinth is…
The gardening analogy to hypertext and online writing has been around for a long time. Hypertext pioneers such as Cathy Marshall and Mark Bernstein saw that the new medium demanded a different set of skills and process than from traditional publishing. These skills were much more like gardening than production work. But the text that…
