Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Titles galore

It's been a quiet week both because of our self-imposed Internet ban (lifted tonight but possibly just for a short interval depending on how well we do at remembering where we really are) and because I've been pushing hard to finish another revision of the book.  And now the much vexed title question rears its head again.  For the longest time, the title had been fixed at "You Are Here."  This was a title that all of us had become quite attached to.  And then the bombshell that another book would release in the fall with the same title.  I think it's a better title for my book than his, but nevertheless....

So then, after much struggle, we arrive at a worthy alternate:  "Where am I?"  I grow to like this title so much that I'm ready to push the button on it when today, as I'm finishing off what I hope will be the last few notes, another option leaps into mind:  "Wish you were here."  I'm not sure about this one, but when I pitch it to my wife I see a visible 'pop' in her facial expression suggesting just the kind of grabbiness I'm looking for.  So there's a new contender.

And now, the coup de grace.  After a long and difficult few days at the office, an unusual amount of office politicking (even for a university) and a roller coaster ride that sees me perhaps lose one major battle and then win another, one of my neighbours rings the doorbell.  Chris is tall, gentle, friendly and a Tibetan Buddhist.  We'd had a conversation last summer about my own interests in Buddhism, and he'd suggested that I might like to visit with his group at some point.  We had a nice chat and then he passed me a brochure about a series of talks that he's involved in over the next few weeks.  The title of the series?  "Where we are."  Suddenly an embarrassment of riches.  It may be time for a vote. 

Biophilic design with kids in mind

I had to spend some time in our local hospital today, so I took the time to assess the  amenities from the standpoint of biophilic design.  This is the idea, supported by pretty good evidence, that contact with the  natural world, even in the form of pictures, windows, and indoor plants, has all kinds of good effects.  It can even speed up healing and reduce the need for pain medication in hospital patients.  The assessment?  Not so great.  In fairness, the wing that I was in was beneath ground, so windows would be tricky unless views of earthworms would be helpful.  But still there is much that could be done with this space to change the way people feel in situations where anxiety would be common.  In a conversation with a member of the audience at a talk I gave recently on how we can use virtual reality to study biophilic design, she told me (and I think correctly) that if our health care buildings can't get this stuff right, then what hope for the rest of the built world?

While I was in the waiting room, I passed some time reading a book called, coincidentally enough, Biophilic Design.  In a marginal way, I'm involved in some work that relates to the impact of urban planning decisions on the lives of children, especially in how they can find contact with nature.  I learned one or two new and fairly surprising facts from the book today.  Did you know that 80-90% of the Ritalin that is manufactured world wide is used to treat attention deficit disorder in the United States?  Did you know that many US schools are stopping recess because it disrupts the school's academic program?  Contrast this to some forms of schooling in Europe--forest kindergartens for instance-- where children are outside all day long.

We have no clear idea how much the placement of walls, doors, and windows might be affecting the affecting the ways our children's brains get put together, but what we do know suggests a failing report card.

Taking my family into the heart of darkness

It's a funny thing to be blogging about, but I've pulled the Internet plug at my house.  As we decided to ditch television about five years ago (and have only ever been sorry during the Stanley Cup Playoffs), my house is now cut off from the outside world except via telephone (which nobody uses anymore it seems), print media, and word of mouth.

Initially, this was something I did not out of any deep reflection on the philosophical ramifications of cyberlife.  It's rather a long story, but it won't be unfamiliar to readers with kids.  On the weekend, most of my children lost their minds at more or less the same time for reasons that in one way or another could be connected to internet access.  My four year old son wanted access to his Club Penguin account.  My 12 year old daughter wanted to spend 8 hours per day on MSN messenger.    I'm not even sure what my other kids wanted to do as they'd drop the screen as soon as I was in the same room.  There was yelling, unhappiness, battles over cyber-time that erupted into yelling and shoving. In one case an adult child of mine descended into fits of kicking and throwing around her school books.   So  after watching this circus develop for a couple of days, I just got up and pulled out the router and I hid it.

Now, life at home is different.  For one thing, several of my children are no longer speaking to me.  There are other positive changes as well.  We're all reading a bit more.  We're spending more time outside the house.  We live in a lovely central neighbourhood that either accidentally or perhaps by ancient design stumbled upon all of the right planning principles to urge neighbours off the front porch and into each other's interesting lives.  We're getting out from behind our terminals and we're going to visit.  Suddenly, more than at any time in recent memory, we have a place. 

I know it won't last forever.  My wife is getting tired of not being able to pay her bills online.  Inevitably, my kids will bring home a school assignment that will require them to conduct what passes for "research" these days and it will need to be done far into the wee hours of the morning.  But right now what seems to be happening is that when my kids need the 'net, they go somewhere else to find it (school, a coffee shop with a wireless zone).  I get my cyberwork done at work rather than at home (sorry editors, but I swear I'm still making good progress on the book).  In the meantime, we're getting the weeds pulled in the yard, we're planning a little social gathering on the front lawn on Thursday night, and we're noticing what the weather is like outside and what phase the moon is in.

Don't tell my kids, but I've actually wondered about pulling the plug permanently.  What if internet portals weren't absolutely everywhere but existed as shared social resources in public spaces?

I know.  Crazy.

sacred spaces

I've been trying something different lately -- on weekends I try to very deliberately keep my mind off of work.  The theory is that this will help me to make a more concentrated effort on the other five days of the week.   We'll see how that goes over the next couple of weeks as my next book deadline approaches...

I spent a good chunk of this weekend reading a novel -- a pleasure that I don't allow myself often enough these days.  My choice, something I thought I could probably manage to follow between soccer games with pre-schoolers and episodes of Bob the Builder, was a book that is not new but has recently become popular for a second time:  Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, which tells the long and entertaining tale of a set of interconnected families in 12th century England, all joined together around the building of a town and a cathedral.

Now, this turns out to be a bit of a cheat for me because it is a novel about architecture, which in turn makes it  difficult for me to read and to not think about work.  It also made tiny mental wormholes for me with a fascinating conversation I'd had recently with a colleague.  The topic was the number of different ways that we manage to create sacred spaces.  Think of St. Peter's Basilica, or any other large cathedral that you might have been lucky enough to stumble into.  The immediate effect of entering one of these huge, sacred vaults is to cause stillness.   And I'm not just talking about a spiritual state here -- I mean that your legs become frozen.  You stand in place, staring up and around.   After standing still at the threshold for some time, you creep forward slowly, often clinging to the walls, like a timid mouse in a wide open field.  This is an inherently biological response, and  it is done deliberately. 

My colleague described a different kind of response that he'd had to the numerous sacred sites he'd visited in Asia, which often consisted of cleverly interlocking small spaces that held you in thrall more with fascination than with shock and awe.  A Buddhist temple is every bit as much a sacred space as a basilica, but the approach of the builders to the problem of bringing human minds to the sublime has been entirely different, if no less deliberate.

Those kinds of differences say very many things about how a culture or religion can use the organization of space to reinforce major themes, ideas, or world views.  So my weekend jaunt through Follett has brought me to a new chapter opening. 

There's just no escaping this thing.

Wayfinding games

I had an email today from a clever young student asking me if I knew about the impending release of this parkour inspired game.  My answer, happily, was "yes" because I follow the Space and Culture blog (where I must once again applaud the noticeable uptick in great content on this site -- thoroughly recommended for those with an interest in, well space, culture, planning and design).  But it made me reflect again on how the times are full of playful interest in space both physical and virtual.  Not only will Mirror's Edge be a hit but so is Portal, a game in which it's possible to warp one's way through walls and floors by throwing down self-made openings between spaces, defying both Euclid and Newton.

The other side of the spatial divide, where we use technological aids like GPS to help us use real space in a playful way is also full of promise.  I like this idea, for example.  I suspect there is no end of clever ways to use this kind of gear both to help us reflect playfully and creatively on what space means to us, but perhaps also to get us off our bums and into the thick of the real stuff.  Time to buy a new computer.  And a new pair of running shoes.

Wet walksheds

Looking out my office window at the rainfall reminds me that the time is now upon me to abandon my car for as much of the spring/summer/fall season as I can manage.  Though I don't always get the time to do it, the 2 mile walk from my house to the university campus takes me through a nice variety of settings -- old treed central neighbourhood to bustling commercial district and then, astonishingly, though a large urban park filled with thick vegetation, water, birds and even a small zoo, and then ending (sadly, the nastiest part of the whole trip) with a labyrinthine negotiation through the series of huge parking lots that surround the university.

The walk influences my perceptions of space on every level, beginning with the fact that I have a proper understanding of where my home is relative to my usual workplace.  The walk normally has a restorative effect on me as well.  Instead of bursting through the door on my arrival home and heading straight for the martini shaker, I find that the contemplative rhythms of the walk through the park have normally shaken loose a creative thought or two so that I'm more likely to race to the nearest keyboard to get some thoughts down on paper.

It's funny then how much of municipal and public health policy attention is focused on finding ways to encourage all of us to walk more.  The benefits are so obvious you'd think it would be an easy sell.

Water: the great leveller

It seems that stories of water are everywhere.  Thousands have just died in Burma, many of them essentially washed away in a deluge of floodwater.  Thousands more will now almost certainly die for lack of safe drinking water.

Those of us in the pampered developed world take our supply of water completely for granted.  We turn on our taps and generally expect what comes out to be drinkable.  We water our lawns and even flush our toilets with the same precious stuff.  We seldom think of what goes down our kitchen or bathroom drains, and the effect it has on water supply.  One treatment with a lindane based lice treatment (easily available in Canada) poisons 22,000,000 litres of drinking water, in spite of the fact that headlice don't really do all that much harm and can be treated in other, much safer ways.  Clever new nanotechnology designed to decrease foot odour (the bane of civilized life, one must think) will kill off aquatic ecosystems.

I spent a few minutes on the weekend sitting down with one of my neighbours, a retired land surveyor for the city, talking water.  The water to my house, it turns out, is at the very end of a long supply line which originates at five large  wells located about 5 km from here.  In 2004, the wells were temporarily closed because of the discovery of high levels of 1,4 dioxane -- an industrial solvent that causes eye and lung irritation, nervous system and kidney damage, and cancer.  What's especially interesting is that my water supply is on what is called a "stump" meaning that the pipes that come to my house are just beyond the last fire hydrant in the supply line before the pipe ends.  This means that when the pipes are flushed to clean them out, my "stump" is left out of the equation. 

What astonishes me the most about all of this is that I knew nothing of it until this weekend, when I learned of the city's plan to replace our water mains next summer (though I imagine that we will still be on a "stump" we will at least then have lead-free pipes), I knew nothing at all of where my household water came from and assumed that it was completely safe.

Many of us are becoming more careful about food - reading labels, considering the geographic origins of our food, reducing the oil cost of nutrition whenever we can.  But water, because it looks more or less the same everywhere and because the taste differences from place to place are (hopefully) only subtle, is easier to consider a placeless commodity. 

But it's not.

How does water get to your home?

Reaching for nothing

I had a great chance to experience some uniquely local high culture last night at the world premiere of Reaching For Nothing: Water's Thirst, a brilliant multimedia piece by composer Peter Hatch and architect Dereck Revington (who, incidentally, designed the much-discussed brilliant aural suicide-barrier at the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto).  I'm not a reviewer, per se, so I'll leave that angle to the professionals (at least in pre-review format).  This was an event that both because of the local talent and because of the venue -- Waterloo's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics -- worked as a marvelous piece of site-specific art.

My fantastic experience at this event perhaps attests to the truth that a performance works best when the observer becomes personally immersed in the presentation.  On a physical level, the set was explicitly designed to encourage such immersion.  Sound sources, both live and electronic, were dispersed throughout the small hall -- which seemed a perfect venue for this piece.  Through clever use of lighting, drapes, and a wee bit of dry ice, visual sources were similarly dispersed through the room at times, enhancing one's feeling of being inside the performance and sharing in it at a more intimate level than that of the viewer. I think I first noticed this when I discovered that the sounds of my own breathing were at first a distraction to me -- yes, it was just this quiet in the hall full of rapt attendees -- but then somehow joined on to the performance to serve as yet one more reminder that I was not on the outside peeking in at something, but rather was an integral part of it.

The performance itself was an extensive meditation on space and time so again a perfect fit for a physics institute and also close to my own intellectual leanings.  Lately, I've spent much time thinking about some of the connections between the two domains.  We use space and time interchangeably sometimes, in trying to understand our own place and impact on the planet.  My own favourite and slightly daffy example of this is the time that I once asked a street person for directions and his response was to wave his arm in the correct compass direction and to grunt "It's about two cigarettes from here."  More fundamentally than this, though, I've wondered how our generally weak grasp of the geometry of the connections between places might relate to our perceptions of time.  I have a colleague who has shown that brain-injured people who suffer from a syndrome referred to as "neglect" in which they act as though the space on one side of their body is missing also have inabilities to estimate time accurately.  Like many people, I have a disturbingly good grasp on time of day, but become fuzzy very quickly about more remote events (did something happen last week or the week before?  Deciding on an answer to a question like this can involve some tricky mental acrobatics).  I've also wondered about the connections between the patterns of space that we find soothing and restorative -- natural settings, forests, water and the patterns of time contained in natural sounds and in certain types of music.  And also the connections between the two.  A part of the epiphany of nature that I wrote about a few days ago was my sense that in nature the sights and sounds fit together with the kind of coherence that one just doesn't find on a city sidewalk. 

Sharing a beautiful multimodal space with a group of talented performers and designers last night gave me a perfectly comfortable little cerebral nest into which I could snuggle and contemplate this interesting set of ideas and to  explore their connections as if watching a dance of waves on an ocean beach.

Placing diet

I don't get to do much travelling for pure fun anymore.  Most of the time, when I step onto an airplane, at least a part of the agenda is to attend a conference.   Not that conferences aren't fun (well, some aren't), but they are most often not held in venues that I'd choose to visit if there were no constraints on destination.  I've just come back from Barbados, where I took my family for no other reason than that we felt like going somewhere and we'd never been to the Caribbean. 

In a world run amok with climate turmoil, food shortages, political and economic chaos, I have to tell you I awoke each morning with a strange feeling of premonition, as if we were all breaking some kind of rule.  And in a way, we were.  My family is very far from the dour, fun-spoiling, sour-pussed uber-socially conscious lot that you might imagine from some of the things that I say here.  We know how to have fun and we have our guilty pleasures, but we do think and talk every day about the mighty problems confronting the world and how best to at least avoid making them worse.  We've seen enough of the world to know exactly how privileged we are.  So for us, flying off to a beach with no agenda other than to grab a few days of badly needed rest seemed to just not sit quite right.

When we're away from home, one of the things that we enjoy the most is the chance to experience local food.  Unfortunately, in the heavily tourist-laden part of the country where we were staying, the only way we could eat was to choose from any one of the twenty or so restaurants that were within walking distance or to shop at the local supermarket, where we noticed an almost total absence of local foods.  I think that the ground crops were from Barbados, but even the fruit came from overseas.  The apotheosis of the whole culinary experience for me was when I found myself one morning munching on a bowl of granola that had been made with local fruit which had been dried, shipped to Belgium for packaging and then returned to a Holetown supermarket.  It seemed hard to believe that in this tropical paradise where all evidence suggested that almost anything could grow easily, we were filling our bellies with products that came mostly from Europe even when the raw materials might easily be available on site.  The little packets of sugar we put in our coffee came from New Jersey.  Sugar.  In Barbados.

We spent the week away insulating ourselves almost entirely from any kind of media.  We did this on purpose as we have all been through a frantically busy winter and felt a need to restore ourselves.  So when I finally plugged back into the Internet and caught up on the news, I was interested to see that while I'd been muddling about the cost and place of food from my rented house in Holetown, much of the rest of the world seemed to have been preoccupied with the same thing, but on a vast and urgent scale.

Something has been desperately wrong with how the world has been doing food for the past forty or fifty years, and now it seems the industrial chickens are coming home to roost.  After an extended period of revelling in the Death of Distance, the rising costs of energy are now beginning to have the effect of reminding us of the meaning of space and place.  Suddenly, it's a big deal that our rice comes (or doesn't come) from Asia.   Suddenly, we have this rush of understanding that we don't really know squat about diet, nutrition or health.  We've allowed a part of our lives that should be sacred and intimate -- the part where we actually take the products of the biosphere in our hands and place them inside our body -- to be industrialized, filled with science and jargon and rendered into something abstract and modern.

I think that this could be an interesting summer.  As food prices spiral, we'll perhaps see more initiatives like this one.  I'm curious to see how many new urban vegetable patches appear as we all begin to think more often of our connection to the planet through food.  In a way, such acts seem trivially inadequate in the face of the massive starvation taking place across the planet, but such small gestures, multiplied by a few billion of us might be enough to trigger a new green revolution.  I, for one, will plant a few seeds this year.