Qualities of human body
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
— Carl Sagan
Unlike engineering, we cannot write a few words with command line in terminal to install a library that might have taken an engineer months to complete. Just like any discipline, billions of lives have lived before us, and we are already standing on the shoulders of giants.
Along with some advisors suggestions, I have complied a reading list that is still subject to change. Throughout the week, different books were picked up and skimmed through, with the intention of identifying how the book may or may not assist me in gaining depth for my thesis topic.
One book that stood out was James J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. It only took one sentence for Gibson to convince me of the book’s value:
We told that vision depends on the eye. which is connected to the brain. I shall suggest that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground. the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system.
— James J. Gibson
The digital landscape has been built with the assumption that eyes are our main information intake channel. By favoring vision, we have disregarded the rest of our body by marrying to the idea that the vision depends on the eyes. This inhumane approach has somehow become the norm within digital designs, and yet considered ridiculous in the practice of architecture.
To consider this further, I have started to lay out some of the qualities of perception highlighted in the book. Though it is still incomplete, the value of the spreadsheet is already apparent, as it will open up conversations about how percepting with the body might escape the rectangle screen as a sneak peek into the digital environment.
