🎪 Spaces Designed for Chinese Calendars, Luxury Cars, & Bioengineered Plants
Mind your step as you enter the worlds of Historical Chronoception, Gesamtkunstwerk, Exaggerated Potential, Fresh Air, and Horror Vacui.
🕰️ Project I’ve Been Working On
Appropriating The Year of the Rat to Memorize Dates
We all lose track of time.
Some of us, a little more than others…
As for me, I’ve managed to make a talent out of it.
Ask me what year it is. Gimme a couple seconds to remember.
Ask me how old I am. Lemme get my calculator.
Ask me what was going on in the 1800s? 👁️👄👁️
But lately, I’ve been studying up on architectural history and while my temporal agnosia could make for an impressive neuroscience case study, I’ve been determined to bypass my handicap with a little intellectual ingenuity.
Which is why I’ve been working on developing my historical chronoception with a DIYed mnemonic strategy.
Historical Chronoception Level 1 — Centuries
You know how the Chinese calendar has things like The Year of the Rabbit and The Year of the Pig, my memory technique is pretty much like that. It associates different periods of history (mostly centuries) with an animal, thereby creating visual anchors to dates.
So for example, if I wanted to remember that the Salem Witch Trials took place within the 1600s, I could imagine a witch being burned at the stake, until a bunch of racoons come to her rescue by peeing on the fire. And since I know that the 1600s are The Years of the Racoon, I’ve created a image that’s hard to forget and tied it to a century.
Historical Chronoception Level 2 — Years
Let’s say we wanted to get more specific and remember that the Salem Witch Trials started in 1692. For the second half of the date we could use something called the Major Memory System, which essentially allows us to translate numbers into words.
Under the Major Memory System, each number from 0 to 9 represents certain sounds.
Vowel sounds (a, e, i, o, u, y), and /w/ and /h/ sounds do not correspond to any number, so they can be used freely.
So back to our example, we know that The Salem Witch trials took place in the 1600s, but now we want to remember that they started in 92 (1692), according to this system, the number 9 corresponds to the “p” or “b” sounds. And the number 2 corresponds to the “n” sound. So, I would think of a visual word that uses those sounds in order, like bun, or pin, or pen, or bone.
So, we could imagine that after the racoons put out the fire they chewed the witch free and she cast a spell that reduced all of her onlookers into a pile of bones.
In the end, thinking of the Salem Witch Trials will trigger the image of racoons + bones, which equals 1692.
Writing it out like this kinda sounds like a laborious system, but once we get the hang of the animal-date and the number-sound relations, coming up with mental images becomes a surprisingly quick and fun process.
🛠️ Idea I’ve Been Thinking About
Gesamtkunstwerk & DIY Design Decisions
A new word I learned this week is gesamtkunstwerk. Roughly translated from German, it means “total work of art”.
Originally derived from the art world to denote works of art incorporating various artistic disciplines, its use in architecture is to describe projects where an architect has had “an all-inclusive ownership over the exterior and interior design of a project, creating harmonious works of art by intimately unifying the whole, from the garden to the tableware.” 🔗 / Source /
The idea of an architect with full control over all elements of a space got me thinking about whether or not people generally appreciate a lack of DIY decor on their part.
The Ikea Effect describes how consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created. So I wonder to what degree giving people more control over the design of a place is a key factor in fostering human-place bonds.
🚘 Research I’ve Been Thinking About
The Power of Place on Petitions
🔗 / Phys.org / Nature Article /
“A recent South African study showed that ‘willingness to sign a petition that calls for higher taxes on the wealthy increases in the presence of a high-status car’. Just seeing a BMW 3-series car near the petitioner made people more likely to favour wealth redistributive policies.”
So it seems that if we want to get people to take action against economic disparity, it helps to surround them with a visual indicator that they’re getting the short end of the stick.
If the closer we get to luxury, the stronger we feel a push to close that gap, then I wonder in what other scenarios picking the proper place amplifies our powers of persuasion.
Want to convince your routine-ridden partner to take a vacation, exaggerate the idea that you’re current lifestyle lacks novelty by taking them to a minimalist environment and showing them some pictures of all the cool places you want to visit.
Want to convince potential customers to dine in your restaurant, exaggerate their hunger by wafting the scent of your food onto the sidewalk near your front door.
Want to convince a carefree kid to study more, exaggerate their ambition by taking them on a field trip to their dream job.
Perhaps, an environmental key to persuasion is to immerse ourselves in an exaggerated showcase of the distance between where we are and where we’d like to be.
🪴 Innovation I’ve Been Thinking About
Bioengineered Plants 🔗 / Neo Plants Website /
I’ve written before about Spaces Designed for Better Breathing and the effect that air and aroma can have on our minds. Turns out there are some really cool companies working in this area.
I recently came across NeoPlants, whose goal is to create plants that have been bioenginieered and optimized to absorb dangerous air pollutants in our indoor spaces.
“We believe that nature is the most powerful piece of technology in the world and that a greener future is necessary.
Our mission is to put nature at the heart of innovation to drive positive change.
We are building the first generation of bioengineered plants that fight air pollution.”
Their white paper describes how certain indoor air pollutants have the ability to impair our cognitive health and functioning.
I focus a lot in my writing on the subliminal influences of our spaces on our psychology, I think it’s also really interesting to think that there’s a whole invisible environment that is also constantly at work impacting us.
🔍 Person I’ve Been Thinking About
Walter Wick — The Art of Savouring & the Savouring of Art 🔗 / Video /
Outside of instagram, where does art show up in your life?
Do you have them hanging on your walls? Do you have them rotating on your screens?
What do you do when you find a piece of art that you love? How often do you return to it?
What do they do for you? Do they inspire emotion, a thought, a memory?
Do you save them?
Do you savour them?
Walter Wick is the photographer and photo-illustrator whose work I know most from the I Spy books.
For those who don’t know, the I Spy books are hidden item games, where the goal is to hunt for a list of items within each elaborate scene.
I find it really interesting to think about how we all have our own unique ranges of emotion. Some people experience sadness more strongly than others. Some people are quicker to anger. And I'd suspect that some people are better at savouring a moment.
Similar to the I Spy books is the genre, Wimmelbilderbuch. They are the Where's Waldo type images, filled to the brim with active scenes. They compel us to take our time scanning their page’s details. They compel us to savour their worlds.
Studies show that when we savour the art we enjoy, we awaken the same part of our brain that is activated through meditation. 🔗 / Source /
So, I think it’s really interesting that us fans of horror vacui art might actually find savouring images of chaotic places to be a meditative experience.
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I spy with my little eye a ❤️ button. How about you lemme know you found it by giving it a click? Thanks for reading, I hope something interesting! Have a great one, Lamar ✌️😁