Danica Swanson
@danicaswanson
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Sage advice from Henrik Karlsson:
"When you design something, a useful definition of success is... the form fits the context —as Christopher Alexander argued in 'Notes on a Synthesis of Form.' This is true of relationships, and essays, and careers: you want to find something that *fits*."
[...]
"The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context."
"To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context."
"The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it."
"If you want to find a good design... what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is." [...]
"The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy: if you could just make it into *another* context your problems will go away."
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/unfolding 1 reply
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This isn't really an answer to your query... but reading this (and recalling a recent cast you made about reverse engineering a shelving unit as your "happy place") brought to mind something that might be worth reading/pondering in this context. Don't know if it'll get you unstuck, but I've found it helpful.
Here are some quotes I like, but the piece is worth reading in full.
"The reason nothing has felt interesting to me, I thought, is that I’ve forgotten the most important thing for me: the path of maximal interestingness is supposed to feel like *fun*. Not fun as in “I feel entertained” but fun as in, “this is engrossing and self-surprising, life-affirming and a little scary.” [...]
"Over the last six months, as I’ve been looking for things that will interest me, I’ve done it coldly. I’ve kept a list of things that makes me say, “Hm. That’s interesting.” That is, I’ve looked for things that match the pattern of how an Interesting Idea is supposed to look. But I’ve forgotten to ask myself what *feels* interesting, as in, “I can’t explain why, but this car with seventeen headlights is just really fascinating to me.” [...]
"The more general point, then, is: interestingness, the compulsion to know, is not a property of an idea; it is a cluster of emotions. You can’t go looking for interesting ideas, not directly. You have to look for that thing that surges up in you—surges like rage, like laughter, like sadness—when you encounter clues."
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/funny-curiosity 1 reply
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