March 11 - The Language of Things

On By Design today Alan Saunders interviewed Deyan Sudjic, the director of London's Design Museum, about his book " The language of Things".

Deyan writes about what things say and how and why they say it. He was driven to write the book to make some sense of the sheer number of useless things in our lives today. He says we buy, collect and consume a great number of things and do so sometimes without really knowing why. People have never before been more burdened with things than they are now.

The idea of consumption started after the Depression when it became the duty of advertising to convince us to buy more stuff to get the economy going. Objects made by crafts people were moved to mass production and this was when design first appeared. Deyan refers to design as a "curious artful thing" that is trying to make world a better place.

Designers have become so important in our consumer environment that we have pursuaded ourselves that some things are very special because of the person whose name is on them.

Design speaks of the culture that produced it. When the Russian and US space rockets were next to each other it was obvious to which country they belonged. The US one was not just functional but streamlined to look good at the same time.

Some things have become archetypes of design. For example the symbol that we use to denote a telephone is still the image of an original handset, the sign used to mark a train crossing is that of a steam train, and a speed camera sign is of a bellows and lens camera.

In the 1980's and 90's design was more flamboyant and that's been replaced by a much quieter style. The original definition of luxury was about things being handmade in small quantities, but now the idea of luxury includes objects made in an industrial process. eg mobiles being studded with diamonds. These days objects have a much shorter life span so we tend not to build a relationship with them.

With these current economic times we may be on the verge of a trend against consumerism, which I think is not such a bad thing.

March 10 - Shakespeare's portrait

Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent for Times Online, reported the following -

"The only surviving portrait of William Shakespeare painted from life has been discovered hanging in an Irish country house, experts claimed yesterday.
For perhaps three hundred years the exquisite oil painting has been passed down through the Cobbe family, aristocrats who can trace their heritage back to Shakespeare's only known literary patron, Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton.

The sitter's identity was always a mystery although there was a family suspicion that it might have been Sir Walter Raleigh. Now Stanley Wells, one of the world's foremost Shakespearean authorities, is “90 per cent” convinced that the debonair figure with a glint in his eyes is actually Shakespeare, captured in 1610 when he was 46.

He would have been at the height of his powers, fresh from the gorgeous romance of Antony and Cleopatra and about to plunge into the fairytale worlds of The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest.

Most previous candidates for a likeness, including the familiar balding man engraved by Martin Droeshout for the front of the First Folio, were inferior corruptions and copies of the Cobbe portrait, Professor Wells believes. All were either made posthumously or leave greater room for doubt about their authenticity.

The Cobbe portrait was “executed with panache, as you would expect from a painting made with a sitter”. That much was clear yesterday when the painting was unveiled in an imposing mahogany panelled room at the English Speaking Union's headquarters in Mayfair.

A barrage of scientific evidence supports the claim, including tree-ring dating of the oak panel on which the portrait is painted, X-ray analysis and infra-red photography. Several of the copies made of it were identified as Shakespeare within living memory of his death, Professor Wells said. With the plausible provenance linking the Cobbe portrait to the Earl of Southampton it amounts to a compelling circumstantial case.

If the identification is correct it alters what we know about Shakespeare in a number of ways. It depicts him as a man of wealth and high social status, undermining the conspiracy theorists' claims that he lacked the refinement to write the works attributed to him.

Intriguingly, it also suggests that he had a longer-lasting bond than previously thought with the Earl, one of the most flamboyant noblemen of the era and a known bisexual who, some scholars believe, had an affair with Shakespeare. "

Wouldn't it be nice to have a scholar from the past who could appear as a ghost and confirm all of these kinds of discoveries? I watch Time Team on ABC1 and they spend a lot of time speculating about what life was like for the people whose history they excavate. I wonder how close they get to what it was actually like?

March 9 - Brooch

I went to my Book and Paper group meeting today and Sue showed us how too make these brooches. We could choose square-shaped ones or round ones.

Sue was very organised and had made up a kit for us to work from that included a template for the pieces, cardboard to cut them from, assorted beads and wire. We then chose the decorative bits from assorted papers, fabrics and fibres.

It was an enjoyable activity and we all agreed that we'd wear the finished items to our next meeting.

March 8 - Nanotechnology

I listened to a podcast of Thursday's Future Tense on Radio National and heard a really interesting story about a collaboration between universities in Australia and China in the field of nanotechnology.

The exact description of the partnership is the Australian Technology Network, a group of five universities in Australia, and ISTA, the International Strategic Technology Alliance which is a consortium of Chinese tertiary institutions.

"The partnership has its focus on the development of nanotechnology. That is, the science of using and manipulating extremely small particles to perform certain tasks or to achieve certain results."

One of the areas that nanotechnology is being applied to is in environmental science and I've copied part of the transcript from the show to illustrate how potentially useful this work is.

"Mike Ford: One of the big areas that we work in is energy efficiency. So, for example, a really big issue in Australia is cooling houses, and the way we generally do that is with air-conditioning, which has significant problems for a number of reasons. It's a huge drain on energy, there's all sorts of other issues involved with it.

So what we're trying to do there is to try and come up with ways of making materials that can help us cool buildings without using lots of electricity. An example of that is you can take nanoparticles, very, very small particles of gold, and these are typically in the range of maybe one thousandth of the diameter of a human hair, so if you coat those on to a window, you can make the window so that it absorbs infra-red light, which is the heat that comes from the sun; you can block out that part of the sun's light, but let through all the visible light. So from the inside of the building it looks very, very similar but none of the heat gets through, or a lot less of the heat gets through. So you don't obviously have to air-condition the inside of the building.

One of the other areas that we work in is one of the really big sources of energy usage, is lighting. So we all light our houses, factories, like the insides of their buildings and so on and so forth, traffic lights, car lights, whatever, and we use light sources that are very inefficient. And one of the other projects we're working on is to try and find ways of making light sources that are very, very efficient, that last a long, long time, so you don't have all of the environmental disposal issues associated with it, you don't use so much electricity in generating the light, and one of the ways that this is going to go in the future is to use what's called solid-state lighting. These are LEDs, basically, and so we've seen LEDs.

The real challenge now is to be able to make those LEDs very, very cheaply, so that you can put them into every light bulb in every single house, and in the short term, the energy saving associated with that is enormous. So these are really good short-term solutions to things like climate change."

it's encouraging to think that there are developments going on that will eventually result in very beneficial outcomes.

March 7 - Habits

I listened to a podcast of By Design with Alan Saunders. He was speaking with Elizabeth Shove who is a Professor of Sociology, University of Lancaster and Visiting Professor, RMIT and Swinbourne, Melbourne.

They were discussing life choice changes that are necessary to accommodate climate change and asking the question “How are our habits standing in the way of real change?”

We acquire habits from observing other people and adopt shared conventions in terms of our habits and these show themselves in our daily practises. These conventions dictate our daily rituals and show up in the processes we follow, from getting out of bed in the morning to eating, work and social habits and bedtime rituals.

Our choices are constrained by the infrastructure design of our cities which tend to dictate that we generally have to live in one area and work away from home. This design hardwiring resists the sort of changes and choices that might address climate change considerations. While infrastructure design is a more difficult thing to change there are still many things that can be changed and that are already changing.

There is a greater awareness of the need to live a life that responds to the seasons. This involves the knowledge about living in a particular house: when to open and close the curtains; insulation and shading; which native plants to have; the best building materials to use; and efficient resource use. The international standard of setting air-conditioning systems to 22 degrees everywhere means the seasons have gone for many people’s lives so they have to relearn how to adapt best at home.

Alan mentioned that Harold Magee in the US pointed out that people in the US could save energy just by cooking their pasta in less water. This infers that many small changes by lots of people can potentially influence things in a big way.

I believe that the best way to bring about change is for everyone to make better, more informed choices about lifestyle issues. As consumers, we are powerful directors of the decisions that governments and manufacturers make. If, for example, we decided only to buy goods in environmentally-friendly packaging then the companies not doing this would have to change or go out of business.

What outcome do you want and what decisions are you making?

March 6 - Fractals

Fractals were named by Benoit Mandelbrot. He's a mathematician who devised a way of mathematically explaining the tendency of many things in nature to follow irregular patterns.

Natural fractals include the shapes of mountains, coastlines and river basins; the structures of plants, blood vessels and lungs; and the clustering of galaxies. Fractals are found in human pursuits, such as music, painting, architecture, and stock market prices. The stock market fractals idea was used in the film "The Bank", starring David Wenham, where fractals were used to bankrupt a bank.

Mandelbrot believed that fractals, far from being unnatural, were in many ways more intuitive and natural than the artificially smooth objects of traditional Euclidean geometry: "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." —Mandelbrot, in his introduction to The Fractal Geometry of Nature.

This is an example of fractal geometry, where each component of the pattern is exactly the same as the pattern as a whole.





When you add more components to the images you can get amazingly beautiful results.

March 5 - Sacred Geometry

This came up in a conversation today and I didn't know what it was so I went to Google and found out that "Sacred geometry may be understood as a worldview of pattern recognition, a complex system of religious symbols and structures involving space, time and form". I don't agree with the "religious" connection because complex patterns exist in nature by design and religion is a man-made construct.

Pythagoras apparently discovered a relationship between geometry and mathematics to music and he believed that "this gave music powers of healing, as it could "harmonize" the out-of-balance body, and this belief has been revived in modern times".

My understanding is that the planet and everything on it is made up of vibrations of different frequencies. This means that everything, by it's very nature, exists as a pattern of vibration with a mathematical basis. For example, colours have particular vibrations and the visual cortex of the brain interprets those vibrations as the colour they are. Taking this a step further, objects that are vibrational in nature can interact in proximity to one another and affect each other's frequency, so that would be consistent with Pythagoras' theory of harmonizing with music.

The concept that we are vibrational beings is backed up the fact that our thoughts are pulses of energy moving around neural networks. Our ears collect sound vibrations and send them to the hearing processing centre of the brain where they are translated into a recognisable form. Our eyes collect vibrations of light and transmit them to the visual cortex where they are translated into images. If you hold your hand near a heat source you can detect the vibration of the heat energy. Your nose translates the vibration of smells in your vicinity.

Matter, the objects in our environment, the stuff we think of as solid, is not really solid at all if you look at it from the perspective of the atoms that make it up. They're moving around in space in the same way that everything else is.

So where does this fit in with Sacred Geometry? If you take the "worldview of pattern recognition" definition then you can say that we, as universal translaters of vibration, recognise the oscillating patterns that exist in the world around us and have identified and reproduced some particularly pleasing ones, such as the one above.

What do you think?