Quite a number of interesting reads on my twitter feed today (I follow mostly academics):
- Dan Lockton talks about the effect of architecture on behaviour here. It's an interesting article, one that underscores the intricate linkages between space, proxemics, culture and behaviour. It's especially useful for those of us in the vertical housing research group. In fact, Lockton's phD Designing with Intent sounds very much like what we want to do with the local architects and housing planners (nudge, nudge Gab).
- For the human/social/cultural geographers among us who are averse to numbers, this article might make you change your stance. Heather Ford is an ethnographer at Ushahidi (I'm jealous!) whose work on Wikipedia forces her to at least consider the possibility of working with numbers. Then she found an article by Ken Anderson and the crew from Intel’s People and Practices Research group called ‘Numbers Have Qualities Too: Experiences with Ethno-Mining’ (she links to it in the post) which led to the realization that "there is no problem with numbers and statistics per se. The problem is when we use numbers divorced from the context in which they are extracted. The problem comes when we use numbers to speak for a community, rather than enabling the community to speak to the numbers." Awesome read.
- In fact, the above article came from the Ethnography Matters website by a group of female academics/intellectuals, and ALL of the posts there are worth reading, in my opinion.
- Heather also wrote this article titled New Geographies. It's a really interesting read.
- If you are trying to remember something, don't pass through a doorway! The Freakonomics team highlights a study by a Notre Dame psychology professor here (which links to the actual research paper) that reveals doorways can cause forgetfulness "because of the way the brain compartmentalizes information" (quote from Freakonomics). Another interesting read and perhaps also the answer to my own memory lapses.
Enjoy!
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