Colin Ellard - You Are Here

My imaginary homeland

My sixteen year old daughter made a rare and very much appreciated appearance at the dinner table on Sunday. I love the way her curious and engaged young mind can elevate mealtime chatter, seemingly without effort and often, it seems to me, without even awareness. There was some music playing in the background and I saw how an instrumental bridge in the song that was playing caused her antennae to raise. I think she was levitating slightly above her chair, straining to put the notes into context. She identified the song, or so she thought, and then realized that what she'd identified was a sample from a song that she knew that had been embedded in a different song. As she recalled the sample, she started to remember the context that had made it meaningful to her and how this original context had shape-shifted for her the meaning of the music we were listening to. I haven't always understood the use of sampling in music and I confess that I'd even been guilty once or twice of claiming in the manner of curmudgeonly old farts everywhere that the practice was evidence that young people making music were falling short of good ideas and so were borrowing ideas from the classics. I know better now, but the few words that my daughter uttered at the dinner table made me think of all of this in a somewhat different way. So I sat for a few minutes, a bit slackjawed, thinking about Salman Rushdie. By utter coincidence, earlier on the same day I'd been re-reading an old essay by Rushdie entitled "Imaginary Homelands". When I first read this essay, sometime in the early 1990s, I'd resonated to its content mostly because I found validation of my own feelings of displacement from a homeland that I was raised to think of as my place of origin, but about which I had only the most fleeting of memories. I'd almost completely forgotten about this essay until my more recent ruminations on ideas about Home, and on Sunday afternoon, sitting on the deck of the 24th place that I've come to think of as the place I live with a capital H, I squinted my way through an online copy of the essay using my tiny phone screen. The irony of that was not completely lost to me. To suppose that Rushdie's essay is about simple feelings of alienation from homeland would not really do it any justice at all, but on re-reading it in the context of my current self-experiment, the part that jumped out at me was his description of his own recollections of Home in India, which he said mostly consisted of the quotidian: "a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved…." It reminded me in so many ways of my own recent trip Home in which I'd been struck by how the most powerfully evocative memories were of the smallest and seemingly insignificant details: the view down an alleyway that ran behind my house, a lampshade hanging in a living room looking exactly as it had almost a half-century ago when I left that room on a frosty cold morning to fly to Canada, a filled-in pass-through from kitchen to dining room that I'd watched my young and brawny father bash open with a sledge hammer. I may not be able to put all of those fragmentary recollections into any kind of Grand, Unified Theory of Me any more than my kid can find any deep, secret meaning in the chain of associations that ripple through her mind when she listens to some music she vaguely recalls. I'm not sure yet. I'm finding it both sad and liberating to think that no matter how hard I stare into that shattered mirror of my early days, there might not be anything else to see.

Mind your mouth

A couple of years ago I had an opportunity to participate in a short mindfulness retreat. As is standard for such things, the participants were encouraged to remain silent and to pay close attention to everything that took place in each moment of time -- mental states, bodily signals, and of course the external environment. This will sound a bit strange, but one of the peak experiences of my day was the midday lunch break. In my everyday life, I tend to scoff something down, usually while sitting at my desk or perhaps even while driving my car. What a different kind of experience to sit on a riverbank savouring a piece of fruit, contemplating its aromas, textures, flavours and even the life course of this perfect little piece of nourishment on its path from field or tree to my mouth. I can still remember lots of details of that lunch--the way the wind felt on my skin while I was eating, the sound of a nearby windchime mixing with the sounds of moving water, the bright sun in my eyes on that cool, fall day. Now, imagine combining that kind of mindfulness with the experience of eating food but this time not a banana pulled out of a lunchbox but instead with food at its source: the mushroom that grows near the gnarled stump of a tree or the tender shoots of a dandelion plant peeking out from a crack in the sidewalk. How would it feel to have to pay that much attention to your surroundings, not just for an afternoon exercise in mind-sharpening, but in order to survive? In my research on wayfinding, one of the strongest themes I've noticed is that those cultures in which one finds the most highly cultivated sense of place and space were also characterized by this exquisite sensitivity to one's surroundings--a kind of mindfulness. And what inevitably followed from this kind of place tuning was a deep reverence. What if there was some way to capture a little glimpse of how that kind of reverent connection to place might feel? Can modern, urban human beings live off the land? And if they do, what new connections might form between themselves and the sidewalks under their feet? Or with one another? Well, an ambitious project by the fabulously clever and creative group Spurse, called Eat Your Sidewalk, has been proposed to answer exactly these kinds of questions. Take a look. You should give them some dough to make this happen. It's important.

You had to be there

What triggers old memories? Most of us have photo albums, digital or otherwise, that we pull out from time to time to help us to remember long-past places, people, and occasions. As valuable as those mementos are, I'm always bothered by my feeling of remoteness from the images. In the best cases, the pictures will trigger a set of associations that will help me to conjure the historical context of what I'm seeing, but even then it's an intellectual response. I don't feel very much. It's as if I'm looking at someone else's experiences rather than my own and, I suppose in a way that's exactly what I'm doing. I've got a small fistful of pictures from this trip to England and the insides of the houses that I lived in when I was there, and I've looked through them a few times. They're singularly unimpressive. In fact, when I was in the houses, strange as it seems after so much anticipation and excitement, I didn't really even want to take pictures, but I knew I'd regret it if I didn't. Thing is, it wasn't the images, the colours and the textures that triggered the felt experience of the houses so much as the activities they afforded. *Doing* things brought back much more emotional recollections than *seeing* things.This was driven home for me while walking around in Walthamstow, on a shopping street that I knew I had frequented with my mother many decades ago. As I walked up to a tall, wrought iron fence surrounding a churchyard, I had the irresistible urge to run along the grass beside the fence, flapping my fingers into the rails of the fence as I went. So that's what I did. I have no idea why that fence called to me in such a way, but I assume it's because when I was a little boy, I'd done the same thing. For a few seconds, all the years fell away and I was about seven years old again. No photograph could have triggered that response, I don't think. You had to be there, as they say.

A distant glimpse of home

I'm back from England and the first leg of my home pilgrimage.  In fact I've been back for some time now.  To say that I'm still digesting would be a bit of an understatement.  I have photographs, notes, and diagrams that I'm still putting together into....something.....but mostly a lot of churning recollections that come into focus fleetingly and then they're gone again.  The good news is that I was able to visit both of my first two homes, meet the wonderful people who live in them now, and through their incredible generosity wander freely through the rooms where I first opened my eyes, took my first steps and, according to one unverified report from a family member, where I peed on the floor a few times as well.

One of the biggest happy surprises of the adventure was the discovery that one of these two homes is still owned by the people who purchased the house from my parents almost 50 years ago.  They told me that when they came to look at the house, they saw me playing footie in the back garden.  It was a bizarre sensation to see myself, as I'd been such a long time ago, innocent short-pants barely-in-school Colin, kicking a ball around on the grass.  I expected my habitation of those old spaces to trigger thoughts and memories -- and it did -- but I hadn't anticipated a distant, tiny image of me as a little boy, in someone else's memory, to unleash such a cascade of feelings.

I'll have more to say soon but I can't rush this.  I want to savour it.

Housing the psyche

In a week's time, I'll be in Britain at the beginning of my pilgrimage into my past, visiting the first two places that meant home to me.  I haven't heard back from the current owners of either of the homes, so I don't yet know whether I'll be seeing things from the inside or simply standing on the sidewalk and peering through the front garden like a deranged prowler.  For an adventure that I've had years to plan, things seem to have come together unexpectedly quickly and now I'm scrambling with train schedules and hotel bookings, trying to make sure I've got everything right.  I'm a little nervous about this.

It's an odd thing, but I've been thinking a great deal about a man I "met" on a call-in radio show a couple of years ago.  He told me that he'd made an impulsive decision to purchase a house that he'd been inexplicably drawn to after a brief viewing.  After moving in, he found himself haunted by negative feelings about the house and he was struggling to find some way to redesign it.  What he'd realized was that the house was very much like the one that he'd grown up inside, and that his childhood had not been a happy one.  It seemed as though he had placed himself back into the space of an unhappy period of his own past without even being aware of it, as if to give himself a second chance to make things right.

I wonder how things went for him.  I wonder if his attempts to open walls and build new doorways in his home built new cartographies for his soul.  

I wonder if anything like that will happen to me.

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?