Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Soliphilia

Thanks to my friend Richard for pointing me to this very interesting article about the resurgence of eco-psychology.  It set a lot of thoughts churning for me.  For one thing, it reminded me of the integral role that a kind of mini-return to nature had on my own life.  When I moved my family to a rural setting in Nova Scotia in 2005, I was motivated mostly by a desire to get myself out of my usual academic setting so that I could put down some new thoughts.  I didn't realize until fairly late in the game how much the particular setting I had chosen, which resonated with me in strong ways that I still don't understand completely, influenced what happened to me.  I don't think it sank in completely until I returned to Waterloo and noticed how miserable I was -- at least for the first few months.

If you read all the way through the article, you'll notice some strong words about the hazards of trying to replace exposure to nature with technology in the form of screens and pixels.  This is something that we think about a great deal in my laboratory, especially as we have good evidence, about to hit print, that exposure to digital versions of nature actually can have restorative effects, and pretty powerful ones at that.  

Our thinking is that rather than to disparage such possibilities without proper scrutiny, it might be possible to use technology to tap into the deep roots of our attachments to some aspects of ecology, not so much to try to replace ecology with electronics, but to try to understand how best to build an environment that can sustain us psychologically, while making concessions to some of the realities of what we've done.  Climate change is here.  Overpopulation is a fact.  Much of the natural world that was present at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is gone and it won't be back.  So do we just fold up the tents and hunker down for the inevitable doom and misery that lies ahead?  Some days that's exactly what I want to do.  But not today.

Pedestrians

I was going to write something today about the spate of pedestrian deaths in Toronto, but then was pointed to this excellent piece in the Toronto Star by Christopher Hume.  Time saved.  The issue is not stupid, inattentive pedestrians.  It's urban design.  One word:  Woonerf. 

Winter-philia

It was only this morning as I stuffed the spawn-hauler with the children of the neighbourhood  to deliver them to their daily dose of institutional life, that I found myself grumbling, as I do almost every day from December through March, about how much I hate winter.  So now, in an idle and unfocused moment where I'm sure there's something I'm supposed to be doing, I've found myself leafing through old photographs on my computer.  I stumbled upon this one:
I remember this day as if it were yesterday yet it was taken on December 19, 2008 during a long walk I took through a local park after a major snowstorm.  This wasn't even a particularly auspicious day for me.  I was on my way to see my doctor for some unpleasant lecturing.  But I remember sitting on a bench, looking out on this vista, and finding it hard to imagine anything much prettier or more relaxing.  At a conference I attended not long before this, on the subject of environment and community health, someone said that there was a study showing that if people are asked to draw a pleasant and restorative environment, they will never draw a winter scene. But I'm not sure that means we can't find pleasure and restoration in environments like the one shown above.  In fact, based on my own experience, I know that we can.

So now I'm struggling to find some reasonable excuse for posting this picture.  Maybe the lesson is just that we don't always think we like what is good for us.  Or maybe it's that looking back on something is different to being right in the middle of it.  Or maybe the idea of something is so different to the experience of something that we should just use our experiences as a guide rather than our ideas.  And now in a peculiar kind of mental connection, I'm thinking of the most recent advice I got from the same doctor I was visiting that day, who said "Colin, I think that if you tried harder to be a normal person and not as hard to be intelligent and insightful about everything, you might be happier."  [sidebar here is that anyone who knows me will understand how such advice is both perfect for me and hilariously impossible for me].  I think he might have been saying much the same kind of thing that I'm grappling with.  Perhaps when we design we need to be less concerned with what we think and more concerned with how we feel.  The body doesn't lie.  

It's my birthday

So I'm taking the day off thinking and I'm going to let Philip Larkin do the space work for me today:

"Nothing, like something, happens anywhere."

 

Black dogs in space

Some of this might get a little personal, so those of you with an aversion to non-confrontational puppet therapy would do well to avert your eyes at this point.  Consider yourselves warned.

 

These past few months have been like few I've experienced before.  The details don't matter to you nearly as much as they do to me, but I wanted to talk here about what I've been learning about connections between feelings and places.  They matter.  My goodness do they matter.  There are many times recently where I've been in the unshakeable grip of the idea that some things are just "meant to be."  Perhaps my object lessons in connections between place and feeling, coming as they have been at a time when I've been ruminating on the possibility of a book that explores such connections, is yet another example of something that was meant to be -- some set of remarkable events, almost too strange to believe, that has changed my course entirely.  I've experienced some dizzying highs and devastating lows over the last little while, but I want to talk about the lows today, some of which have put me into such a deep hole as to worry that I might never come back.  When in the grip of these remarkable cyclones of negative affect, I've noticed that I retreat to certain kinds of spaces.  I seek refuge and avoid spaciousness.  I look for tight enclosures and the protection that they offer from the unexpected.  I've even laid on the floor of my office from time to time, though I have no clear idea of what that means yet.  In my own house, such protective alcoves are not available in abundance.  Most of our family life, as I've mentioned here before and as I explain in my book, takes place in a single very large cauldron that we call "the family room", though I've often referred to it as "the barn."  Over the past while, this place, a boiling crucible of feeling, has become anathema to me. One of the most remarkable things about this, whose significance I've only just understood, is that I managed, almost unconsciously it seems, to have constructed a refuge for myself whose existence may very well have saved my sanity.  I did this by taking a large, carved, Indonesian screen and placing it across an opening in my house between two rooms.  The screen came into my life in a way that is itself almost beyond belief.  I came across it -- literally -- by the side of a road, being set out for trash.  I brought it home thinking only that it deserved a much better fate and not realizing that the screen would fit this opening in my house perfectly.  Not only does the screen stop up a spacious but pointless area in my house, making a beautiful and soothing refuge, but it does other things as well.  As you can see from the picture, the screen is permeated by light.  My little son finds this feature clever in that it allows him to peek through it.  Perhaps he can find reassurance that I'm behind it--that I haven't disappeared from his life.  (Or, perhaps more likely, he likes that he can steal illicit glances at the television set on the other side of the screen.)  For me, the light that passes through the screen represents a kind of hope.  At the same time that the screen makes refuge, the chinks of carved light that stream through it offer me a future more open to my spacious embrace.  Whatever happens to me from here, I will always think of that screen as a symbol of my current struggles and as a bulwark against a kind of madness.  Thank you to Mac, the pilot I never met, who not only shares an unusual name with my son but who lugged this screen back from Indonesia so that I might be saved.  And thanks to the woman he left behind who happened to be standing beside the road on the day that I happened to be nearby, and whom I hope would be tickled if she knew that something that she was glad to see leave her responsibility would come to mean so much to me.  If I wrote fiction, I'd write this story.  Except that it happens to be true.

As dramatic as the events of my own life might have been, I've been reflecting more generally on the impact of the design of domestic spaces on feeling.  It's odd that I'm coming to full understanding with such ideas now, as I've been hard at work in my laboratory trying to understand exactly those kinds of impacts for several years now.  This house we live in, with it's large, unworkable, and strangely shaped spaces, has had more than its share of unhappiness in the past few years.  I know with near certainty that I'm not the first person to have almost lost his marbles in it.  Is that just another strange coincidence?  I'll have more to say about this in upcoming posts.

Geo-craziness

I'm getting a few calls from the media about the crazy GPS failures that are continuing to appear in the news.  The most common question is "how can people abandon common sense in favour of the readout from a machine that is obviously leading them astray?"  I have to admit that I don't have the easiest time with that question, other than to reflect on some of my own experiences where I've, for example:

-driven at least 20 miles out of my way because the GPS told me to, while thinking that it must be harbouring some magic shortcut that had never occurred to me.

-driven past my destination, knowing that I've driven past my destination, watching it go by, but being convinced by the GPS that we weren't quite there yet, so perhaps what I was looking for was not actually what I was looking for!

-experienced a moment of panic while driving on a dead straight highway to an obvious and easy destination because the batteries in my GPS died.  Even as I laughed at myself, I found myself pulling into the next gas station to grab fresh batteries.

I'm not sure that there's a single explanation for the GPS failures we're all hearing about in the news.  Many of them are caused by operator failure.  We type in the wrong destination or we misunderstand what the machine is trying to tell us.  Many failures are caused by the small inaccuracies that can creep into the readout because of the vagaries of satellite reception - things don't always work perfectly and sometimes an error of 20 or 30 meters can cause a single wrong turn and mounting confusion.

I think what fascinates me more than almost anything else though is our blind trust in these machines.  There's an interesting contrast with the compass.  There are many good stories about how good navigators wandering in the woods have come to mistrust their compass because it doesn't correspond with their mental map.  Yet when our GPS doesn't correspond with our sense of direction, we tend to sometimes abandon good sense and become slaves to the little pulsating blue dot.  Why the difference?  Is it because few of us really understand how GPS works, so we suspend disbelief and surrender ourselves to the magic of a little handheld unit communing with fancy satellites in outer space?  Or is it because a compass provides much less spatial support than a GPS.  A compass won't place you on a nice survey map -- it will only help you to use a map --mental or otherwise -- to sort out your position, but you still need to bring something to the game yourself.  Is it possible to design GPS displays that could support our wayfinding efforts rather than to replace them?  And if so, would anybody want one?  

It's a new year

My most embarrassing moment of the year so far has been logging into this account and discovering that it has been so long since I have posted here that I a. had to struggle to remember the URL and b. find the interface has changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable.  My bad.  But I'm back for real, and thinking, like most other people I know, of the year ahead and what it might hold for me.  I'm not big on new year's resolutions (especially this year) so I've kept things modest.  I resolve to remember to shave at least once a week.  That's it.  What else is on tap for me?  

Work:  I have scattered over my desk a clever suite of equipment that I can use to monitor all kinds of interesting vital signs ranging from brain waves to heart rate to body temperature and stress levels.  I'm not completely sure yet what I'm going to be doing with all of this gear (first thing is learn how to use it) but I have this vision of myself wandering strange terrain wearing cyber-gear, building a kind of physiological psychogeography.  Yes, I think what I want to do is to build a map of space using my body.  I'll post some snapshots of how that goes here but also hope to build the adventures into some more serious writing projects.  

Travel:  I've got serious enough wanderlust that I'm afraid I really may be pissing off my employers.  I have a little bit of Canada criss-crossing to do for some keynotes and lectures -- more details here as the times are closer, but I'm also planning a return to Asia.  I'll check in on my crazy brother in Singapore if he'll let me back into his apartment, but also hope to take a side excursion from there to somewhere a bit more exotic.  I'm thinking possibly of Laos or Vietnam.  If I can possibly squeeze out the time, I'm also thinking of finally making the pilgrimage to India.  

Writing:  Lots of ideas still churning away.  I have a book length idea that I've been working up the nerve to get going on for months now.  The travel (and the work described above) are both related, will give me some context and hopefully some inspiration.  I'll say more here about all of that from time to time.

And now back to the last official day of my long festive holiday.  There's still some turkey to be finished off, and I bet there are yet a few more chocolate bonbons I've lost between the cushions of the couch. After that, it's time to get busy.