Brian Kerr

What I noticed from Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work in The New Yorker for March 17, 2008:

Magic is possible because magicians are smart. And what they’re smart about is mainly how dumb we are, how limited in vision, how narrow in imagination, how resourceless in conjecture, how routinized in our theories of the world, how deadened to possibility. The magician awakens us from the dogmatic slumbers of our daily life, our interactions with cards and hoops and things. He opens a door by pointing to a window.

(tags: cards conjecture cybernetics doors hoops imagination interaction magic magician observation opening perception representation routinized theories of the world things visual windows)

From Community and Privacy by Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, partying like it’s 1965:

Until one stops using popular or generalized words to describe specific objects and events, one will continue to be deceived by the associations with them and will fail to arrive at the essential functional aspect of things and places that is the planner’s actual concern in problem — analysis and design.

(tags: analysis arrival aspects concerns cybernetics design essence events failure function functional aspect objects places things words)