Omnivoracious: The wider culture tends to tell stories about architecture that are organized around the Great Creators: the Gehrys, the Wrights, the Pianos (the Howard Roarks). Your stories, by contrast, are much more impersonal—if there are any heroes they are as much the people who explore their environment—the Michael Cooks. Where do people fit into your designs?
Geoff Manaugh: Well, I don’t have that many designs as such—being a writer—but I think the everyday users of buildings are almost always more interesting than the actual creators of those spaces. For instance, what do janitors or security guards or novelists or even housewives—let alone prison guards or elevator-repair personnel—think about the buildings around them? What do suburban teenagers think about contemporary home design, when their own bedrooms are right next door to their parents—or what do teenagers think about urban planning, when they have to drive an hour each way to get to school? These sorts of apparently trivial experiences of the built environment are often far more important to hear about than simply learning—yet again—how a certain architect fits him- or herself into a self-chosen design lineage.
So perhaps we should stop talking to Frank Gehry and start interviewing valet parkers in Los Angeles—or crime novelists, or SWAT team captains. They all have an opinion about the built environment, and about the way that cities function, but no one tends to ask them what those opinion might be.
— Tom of Omnivoracious / Amazon.com interviews Geoff Manaugh of the BLDGBLOG about The BLDGBLOG Book. 2009.
The fact is, neuroscientists cannot explain how the brain carries out the most elementary acts of cognition - for example, how I know the person lying beside me when I wake each morning is my wife. Some prominent scientists and philosophers have reluctantly predicted that the explanatory gap will never be closed. Even if neuroscientists crack the neural code, so that they can determine precisely which neural events are correlated with a given set of mental events, there may always be a strange incongruity between physiological and mental phenomena; something about the mind makes it peculiarly resistant to scientific reductionism. This philosophical position is called mysterianism. You don’t have to be a mysterian to wonder whether the explanatory gap between neurological theories and mysticism will ever be closed. Neurotheologians face not an explanatory gap but a chasm.
— John Horgan. Rational Mysticism. Mariner Books, 2003.
Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and changed in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups.
—Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
By what criteria should we judge our interfaces? If the interface medium is indeed headed toward the breadth and complexity of genuine art, then we are going to need new language to describe it, a new critical vocabulary. Some of this language will rise up sui generis out of the new technologies, but most of it will borrow extensively from preexisting traditions: art and architecture, the cinema and novel. Certain digital revolutionaries will see this pilfering from the past as a limitation, the telltale sign of a thinker still trapped in the analog world of the past. But the truth is, radical breakthroughs are anomalies in the cultural fossil record. The interplay between past and future forms drives the creative process more than it impedes it. Interface designers have much to learn from the invention of the Renaissance perspective, or the buildings of Frank Gehry, and interface critics have much to learn from the interprative schools that have developed around those older movements. We need a new language to describe the new medium of interface, but that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow some of our terminology from the forms that have come before it.
— Steven Johnson. Interface Culture.San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997. page 18.
