monkey see, monkey do serves as a personal blog and creative outlet for
boredom in design
MOVED: this post has moved to my design blog
molly steenson gave an interesting talk earlier this year on strategic boredom in design. you can watch it here:
she mostly surveys here work done in the cybernetics community up until the late 1970’s, such as Cedric Price’s Generator as an example of “strategic boredom” and Gordon Pask’s Musicolour machine as an example of boredom as provocation. She also introduces a typology of boredom coined by sean desmond healy
- Situative boredom (waiting for someone, taking a train)
- Boredom of satiety (doing too much of the same thing, leading to banality)
- Existential boredom
- Creative boredom (being forced to do something new)
she sums her discussion as both concerning what it is like to not resist boredom but to explore it and to see “what happens when we let boredom approach us and when our objects get bored with us.”
i found this interesting as a designer, but particularly interesting since boredom is something we discuss often in shambhala buddhism as a specific inquiry during long meditation retreats and in trying to understand underlying emotional energy.
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22. June 2008 at 6:52 am :
I have never been clear on what “boredom” means. For me, the most relevant thing that I have ever heard about boredom has been “if you are bored, you are probably boring.”
It has always seemed to me that being present in Buddhist practice has always led to an element of awe. Awe at the most simple of things. When you are awake and open to your surroundings boredom is simply not a possibility. The world is open to you for you to discover new layers of complexity and multiplicity in each moment in the most mundane of phenomenon.
In terms of her interpretation about design and boredom…there are times when surprises feel like opportunities and there are times when surprises feel like obstacles.
As a theatre artist I loved the “black box”. We could configure the space to create any type of view or level of intimacy for a performance…we were not beholden to the proscenium point of view. We could go far beyond the “4th wall” myopic perspective for the audience. That said, I don’t want to have to reinvent my perspective when I am trying to get something done. I like to “refresh” my perspective but it is pretty damn nice and ‘useable’ for some things to be predictable.
Maybe she should get herself out of Princeton, NJ and go to Delhi, India.
boredom, annui and Morrissey might take on a whole new appeal.
22. June 2008 at 7:17 pm :
I think I agree that awe is possible in any experience, though the long retreats where you stare at the same square foot of floor space is perhaps harder to have persistent awe.
I also think there is a difference between appreciating the richness of phenomenal experience and creating an elaborate mental story on top of phenomenal experience. Usually the latter is what I do when I’m bored, I fabricate all kinds of story lines about the situation, or about some random train of thought, and get caught in my mental dreamworld. So that reaction to boredom is a little different. And I fear it has the side effect of establishing a further habit of retreating into a conceptual world instead of opening to the richness that is already there. At least that’s what I find I do generally…
Anyway, I’m relating to the meditation point really and not the issue of design, but that’s because I’m at a retreat center right now and soaking in it. Life is good.