online: 19 september 2010 modified: 18, 19 september 2010 18 september 2010 on a seat among trees
city forest
...saturday afternoon and someone is juggling with three or four large skittles beyond the trees... earlier i passed someone attempting to throw a diabolo and catch it on the string between sticks with which he threw it (a double-cone shape) into the air... and then six people (each with what could be nature trail notes) move closer to examine the lower branches of the tree beneath which i am sitting... and now they've gone... and in my mind the peaceful feeling of this space returns...
...the seat on which i sit is well designed to support the back... extremely rare among the many seats i've experienced since fifty years ago i began to perceive sitting (and much else) 'ergonomically'... mainly by 'listening to sensations' (to what i call the existentia) of a thing that's supposed by its designers to be comfortable, useful, or adapted to people... but it's often the reverse...
...i still think that the world we have designed is grossly mis-matched to the people inhabiting it (ourselves) and will remain so while things are designed by professional specialists and not by everyone 'as users' aided by software... this idea may have been unfeasible in the past but now (with the help of computing and the web) it is possible, i think, to envisage and to explore in fiction if not the reality of this reachable utopia... and that is what i've been trying to do for most of my life but as yet without the necessary social changes... enormous... way beyond the range of socialism... or of capitalism... or of the consumer culture, as we know them... these obstacles to what i now call xdm or expanded design methods... a means to real improvement of the human condition...
...but i'm still sitting here on this rare example of well fitting design and hearing a crow cawing harshly in the tree above and the sound of two people talking in a language i do not understand... which reminds me that language, in all its change and flexibility, is the model for what i have in mind... and it's not imposed from a power centre but changes spontaneously as each of us (in the enormously skillful acts of speaking and writing) reinvents and reuses words anew according to the novel needs of each and every thought we utter copy or adapt... aha!... this sentence too can exemplify what i'm thinking if, as it runs on unexpectedly, it takes on two boys on bikes who pass unaware of their unconscious skill of riding on two wheels without any fear of falling... and again cawing birds that may not be be crows but who seem to me to be responding to each other... and are thus taking part in this writing...
...what i'm writing here is not 'classical' or scientific ergonomics but it aspires to an evolution of our ways of making and shaping our world that could truly be utopian... and with the beautiful evolutions of nature before us what on earth are we waiting for?...caw caw the birds are coming closer to this clothed animal with moving finger and touch screen who records their presence in both forest park and written world that we inhabit or construct when reading this or any text at all... eureka here it is
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