On his ambient music, like Music for Airports:

It’s closer to sitting by a river than watching an orchestra. . . Some of that music came out of trying to find something I could listen to while trying to work. . .

[the other music was] too attention-grabbing, it was designed to grab your attention. . .

One is always inclined as a composer to put in more than you need as a listener. So one of the very good things about working on this, is that there’s a speed control. I work on them much faster than I end up releasing them, generally. In the days of analogue tape a lot of the music I released was released at half the speed I recorded it at. . .

This is the opposite of what people are doing on television, where they accelerate everything. . .

I find with music — if you’re making it — you always tend to fill the gaps. You want to paint the whole picture. But if you’re listening, you actually want a lot less than that. So I do that the simplest way by slowing it all down.

From a session with game designer Will Wright done by the Long Now (view the summary or download the audio). I’ve cut out Wright’s comments only to get to the heart of what Eno was trying to say.

Chicago used to use an extensive series of small underground trains for transport between large downtown buildings.

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Here’s a road which had been cut with grooves in order to create musical notes. It’s reminiscent of a very late-night (possibly slightly drunken) conversation I had several years ago with a musician friend about outlandish possible ways of distributing his music. They’ve actually done it.

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Paradoxes of Creative People

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Flow fame writes a piece on creative types and their many paradoxes.

Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton’s words, “on the shoulders of giants.” Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They’re also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements

Athens Olympic Venues Unused

Living in a former Olympic City with an unused main stadium we only managed to pay off two years ago (the Montreal Olympics were in ‘76) I’m not at all surprised to see this video showing the unused state of the venues from the Athens Olympics. There’s something about the Olympics that seems to make architects think they can just drop their stadiums and athletic facilities in the middle of a field of concrete with no regard for how they’ll be used for the decades after the games. There’s little wonder that they’re often abandoned and somewhat depressing as soon as all the crowds leave.

The planning committees should have retrofits in mind when they build the facilities to keep them functional when they’re done with - including covering up some of that ugly and barren concrete with something practical.

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Elevator Group Behavior

A classic clip from Candid Camera which shows just how easy it is to get people to bend to group behavior.

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HP Packages New Laptops in Messenger Bags

A simple solution to reducing packaging, so long as those messenger bags are at least somewhat decent in quality.

The Gruen Transfer is the glassy-eyed, all-encompassing state of pure shopping consumers get in when they walk through the doors of a shopping mall or large department store. Douglas Rushkoff, in an article for PBS, describes it as:

a psycho-physical response to the overwhelming sensory data in a self-contained consumer environment . . .named for the gentleman who invented the shopping mall, where this mental paralysis is most commonly observed.

Gary Klein, in his book Sources of Power, tells a story of a study he and his wife conducted with CPR instructors. They created video tapes of people performing CPR. Some were novices who had recently taken a CPR course, and some were experienced paramedics with years of performing CPR in the field.

The videos were then showed to three groups - novices, paramedics, and CPR instructors who had never administered the technique on a real victim in adverse conditions. The groups were then asked to choose who they would want to perform CPR on them if their life depended on it.

The results showed an interesting difference in perception. The paramedics and novices mostly chose the paramedics, but the instructors chose the novices. The paramedics did not do all the steps as they are taught in the class, for example measuring exactly where to put their hands. The paramedics worked quickly, but in a way that appeared sloppy to the instructors.

I stumbled across this great page on Wikipedia, useful, I think, for all sorts of people - a directory of all kinds of cognitive biases.

Here’s one, for example, the Peak-End rule. which states that when remembering an experience, people generally remember the peak of the experience (positive or negative) and the end. Everything else is pretty much discarded.

In one experiment, one group of people were subjected to loud, painful noises. In a second group, subjects were exposed to the same loud, painful noises as the first group, after which were appended somewhat less painful noises. This second group rated the experience of listening to the noises as much less unpleasant than the first group, despite having been subjected to more discomfort than the first group, as they experienced the same initial duration, and then an extended duration of reduced unpleasantness

As a kid, my family used to take week long trips down the St. Lawrence Sea Way in our musty old cabin cruiser. I always got great pleasure from leaving the relative safety of the cabin and moving to the front deck - a maneuver that required precariously hanging off the side of the boat via a handrail and navigating a foot-wide ledge, all while the boat was in motion ad bobbing on the waves. It wasn’t terribly dangerous, but just precarious enough to put a land-lover like myself slightly on edge, and get me out of my everyday complacency. I found myself just slightly energized by doing it.

Now imagine if you had a similar experience every single day. Imagine if walking to your kitchen was enough to put you slightly on edge. That seems to be the goal of the house recently designed by architects Arakawa and Gins, featured in this article in the New York Times.

In addition to the floor, which threatens to send the un-sure-footed hurtling into the sunken kitchen at the center of the house, the design features walls painted, somewhat disorientingly, in about 40 colors; multiple levels meant to induce the sensation of being in two spaces at once; windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets; and an open flow of traffic, unhindered by interior doors or their adjunct, privacy.

It also brings to mind Francois Roche’s Asphalt Spot, a similarly designed undulating parking lot designed to make people question their safety and complacency.

This is the first part in a short series about how humans make choices. Different posts will cover different methods or factors used to make choices.

When Gary Klein, author of Sources of Power, set out to examine how decisions were made by firefighters on the job, he expected that the experienced fire chiefs and decision-makers would compare several options at the same time and choose the optimal choice based on some criteria or process he hoped to discover. He found, however, that the subjects, under huge time pressures, were more likely to analyze no more than one idea at a time. If the idea sounded plausible, they’d try it. If they didn’t like the idea, they’d discard it. They very rarely, if ever, considered more than one option at the same time.

Herbert Simon, the researcher first credited with identifying this process, in a sense, called it “Bounded Rationality”. The idea is that in many cases, limitations on the time or effort needed to determine the optimal result often mean it can be better in some cases to use heuristics, or rules of thumb rather than calculating the pros and cons of each choice. In the time it would take to make the perfect decision, it could either be too late or enough time may have been used in the decision-making process as to make it less economical.

While not always an optimal choice, Satisficing is a useful concept to understand for situations short on time.

Risky Shift is a term which describes the fact that in many cases people in a group can actually take more risks than they would individually. A study was initially developed by Kogan and Wallace in 1967. Individuals were given two choices, one riskier with a larger potential payoff, and asked to estimate the chance of success for the riskier choice. The same study was then done in the group, where the chance of success was mostly estimated to be higher.

Later studies went on to refine the theory, and it was discovered that groups actually tended to become more polarized than individuals. If someone holds a belief as an individual, that belief will be amplified when in a group, so long as the rest of the group holds similar beliefs.

It’s extremely unintuitive, in a sense, as we generally consider groups to be more conservative. Though it should be pointed out that it definitely does not indicate that the group will make good decisions.