Categories: uncategorized
Date: 26 January 2007 11:15:55
I've been thinking about design lately, or more accurately how badly designed so many of our human environments are. For many years my parents had in their kitchen a rocking chair. The problem is the chair was right in the middle of the busiest walkway in the house. Over the course of a few years they must have bumped into the chair 1000's of times while walking between points A and B. In the end I explained to them that they had a big chair in the busiest walkway in the house...and they seemed genuinely surprised!...as if they'd never noticed! So I'm on a mission to improve the ergonomics of my life; the physical and mental environments; inner and outer. I think it was the sculptor Grayson Perry who wrote that the benefit of psychoanalysis for him was that he was better able to find the mental tools he needed when he needed them. That's not rocket science, it's just good re-designing of ones mental environment. That's partly why I play guitar and read novels, because it helps fill in the details in my 'inner map of reality'. So why are so many of our living spaces so ineptly designed? Perhaps because we don't engage in the self-reflection needed to analyse our behavioural patterns. That may seem like a lot of effort, but in the long run it saves so much time, effort and money because everything is within easy reach and things don't get lost.
Need some inspiration to help you stop bumping into chairs? Sarah Wiggleworth Architects.