online: 31 march 2017
modified: 31 march 2017
30 march 2017 enlarged ponds on the heath
...first visit to the enlarged ponds since i joined the protests against
them several years ago... but now that i see the resulting new
landscape... i change my mind...!
sitting on the only new seat (on the bank of a pond that was linear and
is now seems nearly circular... and is i suppose submerged several
metres below the new pond...
...i ceased writing... to speak to a man who came to sit on this
solitary new bench... he tells me that he studied civil engineering in
Southern California... and i was surprised to learn that he did not know
what a blog is... i was glad to say that i prefer to call this blog a
'digital diary'... or 'public writing'... and that the engineers who
made this new pond seem to have learnt from their critics (of the 1960s
and 70s) as this enlarged pond (with an island and isthsmus) is
definitely a 'more human' improvement... replacing the 'straight line
thinking' of engineering as it was with a new kind of 'curved thinking'
of the present century... and of all of us...
...and as those words appear on this electronic writing pad i realise
that here (in this modest yet sensitive improvement of engineering as it
was) are the 'seeds of human futures' that i long ago sought in the form
of 'design methods' *
*'seeds of human futures' is the subtitle of the book Design Methods...
(for the 1992 edition i omitted the subtitle... )
...and with that little change in the direction of public thought is
what i now call dmx (for 'extended design methods')... the new way we
all can walk if we relook at the recent past for the signposts of
improved reality... no longer radical nor utopian but already an
achieved reality... in the fringes of our works... as in our minds...
(minds learning from each others' actions)...!
[ perhaps no one who does not share my actual experience will grasp all
this immediately... but to me it seems to be a new reality... or the way
i've now to go... with whoever (like that very civil engineer and all
the others) can provoke such thoughts as these ]
though in our minds is no place... nor in heaven...
...as these words are being written three ducks rise high above the
water... leaving three expanding circles on the water surface... ddx...
or even here?
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