Resort switches
A quick email this week, because I promised myself leisure and I still have a few hours left in Paris:
I picked up Ex-formation at a small bookshop in the third arrondissement. It is a book about many things, but mostly about design alteration: about taking forms and images that we know intimately and building upon them in a way where the change brings insight not only with the new form but to our understanding of the original form.
One of the concepts the book provides that has been stuck in my head is the idea of a Resort Switch:
Tomita’s idea originated in the yuragi (fluctuating breeze) mode of an electric fan, which makes the motion and speed of a fan irregular and unpredictable. Changeable like nature’s breeze, this is comfortable for us. As we come to value irregularity, we find resort lurking between humans and machines. On a TV, the resort switch makes the images gradually and imperceptibly fade into white; eventually the screen goes dark, giving us a wavering moment of gentle, sleep-inducing light and lessening the lonely silence that normally falls so suddenly when a TV is switched off. This is a design located between ON and OFF. On the telephone, the resort switch activates harmonious background music, so if your interlocutor is a close friend or relative, the music makes for a nice mood.
I’ll be back in Seattle in a little bit, and I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things — the mundanity of a well-manicured existence — but for now it is incredibly nice, having not looked at code or metrics or anything of the sort for the past week, checking my email only when spotty WiFi allows, armed with a metro pass and a copy of The Night Manager.
Later that afternoon, I picked up a calculator from the MUJI store. There is something to be said, too, for confluence, for the resting point of things.