Colin Ellard - You Are Here

A shot in the dark

Yesterday i sent letters (and freebies!) to two addresses in England.  One was the house in which I was born and the other was the house that I left at the tender age of 7 to vault across the ocean to Canada.  Well, ok, the vault was in one of those venerable old Boeing 707s so I suppose it was more of an amble but a bit faster than a sailing ship.  I tried to imagine how it might feel to get a letter from a complete stranger asking to come take a peek at your house and ask you a few questions.  If it was me I think I'd be intrigued and quite keen, but I can imagine that things might not go as well as I'm hoping.  Time will tell.  

It's a little daunting to realize that this entire quest to visit every place I've called home will consist of 24 different houses and apartments on 3 continents.  It's going to take a little time.  Some of these homes were chosen out of pure expediency - there were times when I was such an unattractive tenant --massive untrained dog and ragtag kids in hand -- that I had no choice but to leap at the first landlord foolish enough to let me unload my stuff inside their real estate investments.  Others,like my current home, seem to have been tailor-made for me and have felt like home from the moment that I first walked into them.  I suspect my friends are more tired of hearing the story than I am of telling it that I made the decision to buy this place within five minutes of walking in the front door and I had signed a terrifying firm offer within an hour.  But that's the end of this story.  I'm still not even at the beginning.

The beginning of everything

In about three weeks, I'm going to fly back to the beginning of everything.  Or at least the beginning of my everything.  I'm going home.  

One of the things that I'm most interested in is the interaction between  home and psyche.  I've tried to understand this link in a number of different ways:  I've conducted impromptu interviews with friends, family and strangers on the meaning of home.  I've designed elaborate virtual reality simulations of homes that people can walk through while wearing a suite of instruments that measure their physiological state.  I've talked to architects, designers, stagers, planners about what home means, and I've sat on committees where we've turned questions about home upside-down and sideways.

Now it's time to get a little more personal.  I suppose, in a way, you'd call this a pilgrimage.  In fact, I'm certain that that's what it is.  But in my case, I'm not going to walk the Camino.  I'm going to retrace my own path across the planet from the day that I was born up to the present.  I'm going to re-visit every place that I've ever called home.

The journey begins in early April when I'll find myself on the doorstep of an ordinary looking house in Stevenage where, about a half-century ago, I was born.  I don't know yet whether I'll be able to go inside the house, but that's my fondest hope and the truest beginning I can think of for a project such as this one.

Right now, for me, the idea of standing in the room where I came into being seems too staggeringly huge to even contemplate.  I think there are many reasons for this, and my own special professional interest in home is only a part of the story.  I'm also an immigrant and, like all who migrate from their homeland to some other domain, the very idea of "home" becomes something great and unknowable -- a mythical land to which there is no easy return.  Until I began to think about this project, the very idea that I was "from" somewhere seemed academic and sterile.  Intellectually, I knew it was true, but emotionally, I felt nothing.  Will all of that change when I see the room where the me-egg hatched?

The year behind me

It's pretty typical that I'm writing my final post of 2011 in the early days of 2012 -- that's the kind of year it was - full speed frantic activity with lots of change on both professional and personal fronts and somehow, as always seems to be the case, the two realms were intertwined.

A big piece of my professional life in 2011 was my participation in the BMW-Guggenheim Laboratory in New York City.  The Laboratory opened in August and my now fuzzy recollection was that I was invited on board in about June.  So the second half of my year was really a frenzy of nail-biting, planning, coding, and flying back and forth between mission control and the test sites we used for the experiment.  I had intended to write a series of blog posts outlining what we did for the Laboratory, but I've ended up spending so much time analyzing data (and catching up on all the stuff that got put aside when I dropped everything to take advantage of this great opportunity) that I've barely had a moment to take a breath.

So what was it all about?  I still plan to give a decent accounting of myself here at some point soon, but the short version is that I had an opportunity to design and execute an experiment in urban environmental psychology using some pretty cool mobile gear for measuring people's minds and bodies as they sauntered from place to place in New York's Lower East Side.  It was really one of my first forays out of the world of the virtual into the world of the real.  It was tough!  Collision-detection in the real world is pretty graphic and some bruising may occur.  But I think we managed to put together some tantalizing early findings -- enough for us to begin planning the next round, which I'll also eventually discuss here.

On the personal front, one of the most interesting things to happen to me was that I found myself buying and moving into a new house.  I've spent such a lot of time ruminating about how the house purchase decision takes place and how the homes we live in influence our psychology, that it's been fascinating to self-observe during that process.  As with anything, when the distance between one's data points and one's own awareness is very small -- in this case essentially zero -- any kind of objectivity is impossible.  But this doesn't mean that the process of observing is meaningless.  Indeed I've learned a lot about domestic spaces through the process of adjusting to a new and very interesting living space.  In future months I'll write about some of those adventures as well.

There's much more I could tell, but the year ahead promises to be just as busy as the year just past, and I've got to get going.

More soon.

The feeling value of lines

Sometime back in the 1990s when instamatic cameras were using new film formats and special features to try to get a little market cachet, I remember buying a not-very-expensive model on the way to visit a friend of mine for a weekend at the beach.  I'll always remember what he said when he saw the camera:  "Colin, that looks like a Miata."  And it's true -- the camera had a very curvy and pleasing shape that just made you feel good when you looked at it.  I just thought of this again as I poured myself a glass of pomegranate juice from that very distinctive double-globed bottle.  I've never quite known what to make of the bottle.  It does look somewhat pleasing to me, but it also looks somewhat disturbingly organic -- let's face it -- it looks like organs.  And it makes me feel slightly sad to look at the thing.  I have no idea what the intent of the designers of the bottle might have been, but I would guess that it is meant to suggest that pomegranate juice is good for your body.  But the sadness is interesting.

All of this reminded me of an old line of research that I first heard about last fall at the Design and Emotion conference in Chicago.  The work wasn't presented there but it was discussed in the broader context of how shapes and appearances make us feel.  Poffenberger and Barrows of Columbia University published a paper in 1924 entitled "The feeling value of lines" in which they presented 500 observers with two things:  a set of emotional adjectives (sad, quiet, lazy, playful, agitating, serious, merry, for example) and a set of very simple lines ranging from graceful curves to sharp-edged saw blades.  They asked the observers to simply indicate which of the emotions they associated with each of the lines.  There was surprising universality in the results.  Observers almost invariably saw downward graceful curves as being sad, and angles as being more powerful and agitating.  And it's interesting that I don't even need to show you examples of these figures for you to shrug your shoulders and say 'of course'.

So where does that 'of course' response come from and what does it mean?

Some theories of aesthetics suggest that some of our responses to patterns are deeply inbuilt biological responses that come from ancient circuits designed to respond to important events like the presence of predators or bounty, and I think it quite likely that some of our universality in responses to designs do come from such connections.  But there's another interesting possibility in the case of these lines, which was actually mentioned in the 1924 paper.  Based on a theory of aesthetics described by Ethel Puffer, the authors suggested that when we observe a line, or really any other pattern, we make a series of movements to carry out the observation.  Most obvious in the case of the lines is that our eyes follow them.  The movements of our eyes as we follow the line produce feelings which, according to Puffer, we attribute to the lines themselves.  So the feelings come from inside us and they are generated by the movements that we, ourselves, make as we observe the lines. 

So why should a downward curving line produce eye movements that make us sad?  Why should sharp angles make us anxious?  Perhaps there's a connection with emotional expression.  When we feel sad, we cast our eyes downward, perhaps to reduce input from the external world.  When we're agitated, we move our eyes to and fro, surveying the world anxiously.  In a strange way, it's almost as if the lines are talking to us, encouraging us to express our own emotions in particular ways.

I'm going to look through my fridge and cupboards now to see what other feelings might be hiding in there.

Living a delicious life

I had a great time at TEDx last week and met many wonderful people, and had a couple of nice leads for some new projects.  I had coffee with one of my new TED friends yesterday and we had a really interesting and free-ranging discussion about everything from diet to sabbaticals to how much each of us liked the gritty feel of downtown Kitchener streets (I like the feel a lot but it might just suit my frame of mind these days).  One of the topics that came up had to do with weight control and food.  Jaime mentioned that she had heard that if we made sure that 70% of the food we ate was food that we really liked, then we'd have fewer issues with overeating.  It reminded me of an argument I'd once heard (I think this was part of a discussion of the famed fabulous French physique) that if one only ate things that were truly delicious then obesity could be eliminated.  There are obviously some deep social issues here (would that more of us actually could afford to eat only delicious foods), but that's more or less an aside to the train of thought that left the station following this exchange.  

What if you extended the notion of eating deliciously to more of your life, and in particular what about trying to live the delicious life by taking pains to dwell in delicious places?  For example, when I look out my rainswept office window right now I see some beautiful trees, some interesting undulations in terrain and (finally) some green/brown patches of grass peeking out from under the snow.  It's not exactly delicious, but it's not bad.  In preparation for my talk last week, I went off in search of undelicious landscapes and I stumbled across a partially built box store mall so hideous that I had a hard time trying to figure out how to take a picture of it that would convey how it felt to stand in the muddy parking lot and take in the view (and I think ultimately I failed).  

Are there ways that we can maximize our exposure to delicious vistas and minimize the time we spend with empty design carbs?  It's tough.  I think that we in North America have paid far little attention to the impact of the view on our feelings and, ultimately our health. Now, some recent encouraging developments suggest that this is beginning to change.  At the Healing Cities Summit I attended in Vancouver last October, the explicit agenda was to understand how the organization of cities could contribute to human health, where this meant more than just access to healthy air, food and water, but also to healthy views.  The idea has been floated of suggesting that physicians might prescribe time spent in parks as an alternative or a supplement to doses of Ritalin for ADHD or to anti-depressants.

Most of us battle with issues related to making healthy food choices.  Maintaining good diet in a fast paced North American lifestyle is a challenge that requires careful and mindful decision making.  But what about making healthy decisions about the places where we dwell and what views they present to us?  

Dissing Comfort

I've had all kinds of extra reasons to think about comfort over the past few months.  In a way, this is nothing new.  A part of my work involves understanding what comfort is, how it is measured, and especially how it is either promoted or defeated by the design of spaces and places.  In some of the experiments I've been doing in my virtual reality lab, I've been doing my best to try to figure out how the design of a domestic space -- a home, in other words -- interacts with the personality of the occupant or owner of that space to generate different kinds of feelings.  It's a fascinating question that I can only approach part of the way using my usual arsenal of scientific instruments.  Poking and probing at peoples' bodies and minds will only yield so much information I think.  In fact, it's starting to seem so complicated that there are times when I feel a little embarrassed by my approach, as if the very idea that I can get close to the deep answers I'm looking for using psychological questionnaires and little body sensors is obviously laughable.  But what I've learned so far encourages me to think that I'm on a good path -- that what we can measure will make a difference to how we design, even if we're only really getting a meager slice of the whole pie.

But now I want to get a little more personal about all of this.  I've spent this evening, like many others over the past while, wandering around in a house that I only live in part of the time now, looking for somewhere that's comfortable.  For instance, if I want to go cocoon with a book or just sit quietly with my thoughts, or write some things down, where do I go?  And the answer to that question, I've concluded tonight, is nowhere.  There is nowhere in this house that I can sit happily and feel at home.  But here's the interesting part of this discovery:  maybe that's not such a bad thing.

I had a conversation with my pilgrimage friend Nicole sometime ago.  We were on a little pilgrimage at the time (can a pilgrimage even be little?  Not so sure about that.) so the fine details of that conversation are lost to me now among the big crashing waves of self-discovery our little group experienced during our adventure.  But I do remember her mentioning a friend of hers who deliberately eschewed comfort, and that idea, of veering from shelter, became a kind of mantra for me during the pilgrimage and afterwards as well.    So the new angle here is that maybe there are times in one's life when those feelings of comfort are not really the goal.  And maybe what my body is telling me in some subtle way is that it's got nothing to do with where I sit or what vista is in front of me or how the chair I'm in is designed or who I'm with.  It's got to do with what's going on inside.  It's not time to settle.  It's time to sort myself out. It's tough.  It's....well...uncomfortable.  But it's also completely necessary.  What's happening to me now, during an epic phase of self-discovery perhaps bigger than any I've experienced before, doesn't feel as though it's being driven at all by the spaces I inhabit.  But do the spaces I live in push and prod my thinking in certain directions?  It must be so.  My other home is a small apartment where I spend about half my time.  I don't always feel comfortable there either, but it feels more like a cockpit from which I can steer my psyche with some small semblance of predictability.  When I moved there, it was important to me that nothing come through the door, not the smallest household item or piece of furniture, unless it was chosen explicitly by me.  I felt a strong desire to control all the variables, to keep things stripped down to the minimum.  It wasn't comfort I was going after there, either so much as simplicity, silence and focus.

The relationship between place and person is an evolving and complicated dance that can either promote or impede the process of self-discovery.  I've written about this stuff and I've obtained funding to study it and I've conducted the experiments and drawn all the graphs to try to account for some of the simpler aspects of this relationship.  But now I'm living the crash course.  I don't always like it.  It isn't natural to sit with discomfort.  But it is transformative.

Pilgrimage by wire

I haven't said very much about it here yet because we're saving all of our heavy ammo for an article that is in the works, but I made a new friend in the summer who has turned me on to the idea of pilgrimage.  When we first met online and via telephone, I had a very particular idea about what a pilgrimage might be and mostly it involved images of the Catholic church, bleeding feet, and lots and lots of crucifixes along the way.  Having now gone on a mini-pilgrimage with my friends Nicole and Keith, my mind has been broadened quite considerably, but I can't talk about all of that today.  Not ready for showing, as they say.

Today, just a little thing.  Here's one of those funny stories about people relying on their GPS and becoming lost.  In this case, pilgrims looking for Lourdes are ending up a few miles off course in the tiny hamlet of Lourde where, according to this little article, there's not much to see or do.  We're all getting a little tired of these stories, no?  But in this case, there was a pilgrimage connection, and so I sent the tale off to Nicole.  Her comment was characteristic.  Part of what seems to happen on a pilgrimage is that nothing goes according to plan.  All roads lead somewhere.  If you are aiming for Lourdes and you end up in Lourde then that means something, and it's up to you to figure out what that something might be.  Or not figure it out, as the case may be.  

When these kinds of stories are posted, whether they are about pilgrims or hapless tourists getting lost, I always wonder what they found.  Who spoke to the pilgrims in Lourde and asked them what happened there?  When we travel with an intention, whatever that intention might have been, and we find ourselves blown off course by technology, we find something we didn't expect to find, and it becomes a part of our story.  How we shape that new story to our intentions is in part up to us and in part in the hands of the universe.  I want to know about the pilgrimage to Lourde.  Who speaks for the lost?

Like a stone against the sky

I've been thinking about ceilings today.  Browse through real estate listings, especially those for trendy urban spaces, and you will notice that these advertisements often trumpet fantastic ceiling heights - the higher the better it seems.  Has the old square foot equation for domestic spaces been replaced by a linear foot equation that reaches upward rather than outward?  Do we really want to live at the bottom of mine shafts?  One might think that those of us who choose to trade the square footage of the suburban bungalow ranch style for the denser lifestyle of the city loft might want to make sure that every scrap of our premium priced space has a use.  But is a 16 foot ceiling really functional at all?  Unless your urban condo comes equipped with a pair of anti-gravity boots, half of your square feet are in space that is unattainable and, in colder climates like those in much of North America, expensive to heat.  The space is there to look at (and possibly to listen to) but not to use.  So what attracts us to tall spaces?

Historically, high ceilings in old houses were pragmatic rather than functional.  Before the advent of efficient indoor lighting, the only way to get decent light into a house was through windows, so the taller the windows the longer the indoor "day" could be.  Although we don't really need windows for working light anymore, it's very likely that the quality of the light that enters a room from the outdoors exerts considerable impact on our emotional state.  My dearly missed friend the architect Thomas Seebohm once made a powerful demonstration to me of the impact of what was outside a window -- in effect what the window was able to "see" -- on the chromatic makeup of the light inside a room.  And there is ample evidence from colour psychology that the interior colours that bathe our minds can change how we think and feel.

But what about the height of the ceiling?  There is surprisingly little psychological evidence that can be brought to bear on the question.  Some fairly straightforward ideas from the psychology of perception of distance and size would suggest that the way that a room is scaled will influence our impression of its spaciousness, and there is one very interesting and heavily cited study that shows that different ceiling heights can encourage us to engage in different styles of thinking:  high ceilings may encourage more abstract thinking and lower ceilings might encourage us to focus more on the fine details.  High ceilings may make us feel spacious and creative and lower ceilings more cramped and constrained.  

Ideas from the field of environmental psychology suggest that the shape of a living space might affect our feelings for reasons that connect us with the prevailing concerns of our evolutionary ancestors.  Spaces that embrace and contain us offer the comfort of refuge -- protection from threats such as predators or aggressive human competitors.  Spaces that offer grand vistas offer us the power of prospect -- the ability to see what's coming -- whether that be bounty or threat.  So given this, we might expect that a high ceiling wouldn't always offer commodious psychological comfort -- depending on the context and perhaps our personality, just the opposite in fact.

A final perverse possibility is that we are attracted to high ceilings precisely because they are useless.  Just as the peacock's tail advertises the fitness of the cock by signalling honestly that the bird is able to stay healthy and avoid catastrophe while also looking after an enormous but useless appendage, the 16 foot ceiling may advertise the healthy economic status of they who rule the urban roost.

I'm haunted by an idea

At one of our semi-regular raucous family gatherings on the weekend, there was discussion of the possibility of a sleep-over at a well-known and very bloody location in Canadian history (details under wraps for now).  I blame the vodka for the fact that it didn't really occur to me until the following day that such locations would make for really interesting studies of connections between feelings and place.  Anyone have suggestions for places I could visit?  I don't mind travelling around a bit. 

The lonely library

A friend of mine has been berating me for my voracious book habit.  Yes, it's true.  My name is Colin Ellard and I have a problem.  It's gotten to the point where I have to leave my credit cards in the car when I go to browse the bookstore, else a week's grocery money is sucked out of my account in a matter of minutes.  The problem reached it's apotheosis (I hope) when I purchased a Kindle and found myself sitting in the big chair with the Books section of the newspaper in one hand and the Kindle in the other, finger poised over the one-click-purchase button.  Now I've hidden the Kindle from myself and I'm relying on the creep of middle-age memory loss to protect myself from myself.  But even though I can't find the thing, I received an email from it a couple of days ago complaining that the credit card attached to the Kindle store is overlimit and is being declined.  Wherever the machine is, it's apparently taken on a life of its own and is buying stuff, presumably using the famous Amazon "if you glanced at this page, we know you'll love a dozen of these..." ruse.

My friend went so far as to accuse me of hoarding knowledge.  She dared me to attach a "best before" date to any book that I purchased and if I hadn't cracked the spine before expiry I should hand the book over to someone else who might actually be able to make use of the thing for something other than filling up an empty corner of my apartment.  I love the idea, but I don't think my own weak spine will allow me to follow through.  I'd rather do something like this, though I'm not sure why.  Perhaps it's the appeal of the mushrooms.

My friend's jarring but well-intentioned attack on my bibliophilic impulse led me to start asking the hard questions and making some mental connections, and I've realized something important.  I've been spending a fair bit of time alone lately.  It's what I need, but I've noticed that the moments when I feel a bit of resistance to solitude are most likely to be the ones that find me with an itchy Amazon trigger finger or a GPS that stubbornly points me in the direction of the nearest book super-emporium (I tell myself I'm going for the candles and the potpourri, but even I can see through myself).  I buy books for all kinds of reasons, but one of them is to stave off loneliness, and I think this is something that's been going on  since the days when I was the geeky kid who, while my friends were out riding their cool bikes with those big banana seats and imagining what it would be like to get laid, I was the one with the membership in the Science Fiction Book Club and the Time-Life Library of Art.

It was with all of those thoughts roaming around today that I stumbled across this beautiful interview with Jonathan Franzen. I confess I've never read anything by Franzen (and my not having read The Corrections I suppose puts me in the same club as the 17 North Americans who haven't seen Avatar yet [and I haven't]), but this interview made me want to read everything he's written, beginning with this one (Oh Jeebus here we go again.)  You can scroll about halfway down to find the relevant bit (better to read the whole thing though) or here it is in excerpt:

AVC: How much do you think about the concept of readership? It’s changed so much, even since your last novel. It appears to be more about interactivity and instantaneous response, and about everyone having an equal voice. Do you think that can be good for literature? Is it changing how people read so much that it’s antiquating the experience of being alone with a novel? Or for your purposes, is it just irrelevant?

JF: Well, let me think where to begin. It’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to. I think novelists nowadays have a responsibility—whether or not my contemporaries are actually living up to it—to make books really, really compelling. To make you want to turn off your phone and walk away from your Internet connection and go spend some time in another place. That’s why it takes me so long to write these books. I’m trying to fashion something that will actually pull you away, so I’m certainly conscious of the tension between the solitary world of reading and writing, and the noisy crowded world of electronic communications.

I continue to believe it’s a phony palliative, most of the noise. You have the sense of “Oh yeah, I’m writing in my angry response to your post, and now I’m flaming back the person who flamed me back for my angry response.” All of that stuff, you have the sense, “Yeah, I’m really engaged in something. I’m not alone. I’m not alone. I’m not alone.” And yet, I don’t think—maybe it’s just me—but when I connect with a good book, often by somebody dead, and they are telling me a story that seems true, and they are telling me things about myself that I know to be true, but I hadn’t been able to put together before—I feel so much less alone than I ever can sending e-mails or receiving texts. I think there’s a kind of—I don’t want to say shallow, because then I start sounding like an elitist. It’s kind of like a person who keeps smoking more and more cigarettes. You keep giving yourself more and more jolts of stimulus, because deep inside, you’re incredibly lonely and isolated. The engine of technological consumerism is very good at exploiting the short-term need for that little jolt, and is very, very bad at addressing the real solitude and isolation, which I think is increasing. That’s how I perceive my mission as a writer—and particularly as a novelist—is to try to provide a bridge from the inside of me to the inside of somebody else. 

I think he's right that solitude and isolation are increasing, but is that increase being driven by techno-consumerism or is the staggering popularity of social networking a consequence of something else that's happening?  Logging off now to read a good book.