I am an interactive media specialist with 15 years' experience leading projects that push the boundaries of new technology within different organisations. I get involved at the start of new projects, scoping them and developing prototypes. This is a personal blog about things I'm interested in. If you want to chat please contact me via Twitter.
A building on Hampstead Road just north of Warren Street Station advertises office space available, 104,518 square feet or 9,709 square metres of it to be precise. I was struck by the icons used in the window which at first glance tell you a lot about the amenities as you pass by.
Starting from right to left a P tells me the office has parking, a C crossed out tells me it’s outside the London congestion charge zone, a glass tells me there are bars nearby, and the London Transport and Eurostar symbols tell me it’s within easy reach of public transport. I wasn’t sure about the leaf.
A second window with a similar advert tells me the office has ‘all the right signs’ and directs me to the building’s website at www.stephenson-house.com. This is fairly predictable estate agent nonsense where better locations are no more than a few minutes walk away…
Only 3 minutes to fashionable Charlotte Street and Fitzrovia, providing a wide selection of acclaimed trendy bars and restaurants to entertain clients or relax with friends and colleagues out of hours.
…but nevertheless the icons work well and did their job. Should I be looking for 104,518 square feet of office space they would have already had me take the first step.
I’ve recently finished reading the seminal art history and visual culture book Ways of Seeing by John Berger. For five years it’s sat on a shelf with a bookmark at page nine and although I’ve picked it up many times I’ve always failed to read any further. Then a couple of weeks ago something clicked and I read the book from cover to cover. I’m glad it did because had I not I would have missed this:
We are now so accustomed to being addressed by [publicity] images that we scarcely notice their total impact.
and this:
Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society.
and this:
The act of acquiring has taken the place of all other actions, the sense of having has obliterated all other senses.
When I picked up the book this last time round I knew what the problem had been all along: until recently I don’t think I’d ever heard John Berger speak and until I imagined him reading the text it didn’t come alive. For one thing the fact the book is typeset in a heavy weight of the Univers font means it’s not the easiest to read but it seems to fit with John Berger’s narrative voice.
The book is based on the four-part BBC series of the same name originally broadcast in 1972 and shown again last year on BBC Four (you’ll find most of it on YouTube). A friend recommend I watch it when I was researching colour and having done so I gave the book another go. I read it so quickly it got me thinking about other books I’ve taken time to get into and I realise it’s a recurring theme.
I found the style of The God Delusion mildly irritating until I remembered that’s just how Richard Dawkins comes across in person, but in real life he has humour and humility that you need to take back to the book. And I remember reading The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg which is a fascinating biography of our language which makes far more sense if you read it like it’s an episode of In Our Time.
The amusing thing for me is that having made the link between how I read and how narrators talk there’s a subtle clue to all this in the very first words of Ways of Seeing which appear, unusually, on the front cover. Had I thought about them more closely I might just have finished it sooner:
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.
November 6th, 2009 in Perception | Read more
The picture for this article is a block of colour with no alternate text or title. Assuming you can see it, think about what you would call it before you read on.
If you described the colour above to someone else it’s likely they would imagine something quite different. You could describe it as lavender, lilac, mauve or pale purple but in each case there’s no universal meaning for these words.
If you’re more technically minded you could sample the colour to discover its hex value is #9B90C8 but if someone else used that value to create an identical image there’s no guarantee they would see the same thing or give it the same name. This is because our perception of colour is relative, subjective and learned.
Firstly, each colour we perceive is relative to the other colours that surround it. The most powerful example of this is the illusion of yellow that’s created when you move brown into the shade. Brown doesn’t appear in the rainbow and we only perceive brown objects based on the brightness or darkness of other objects in the vicinity.
Secondly, each colour we perceive is subjective because each pair of eyes is different. Some people are colour blind which suggests a disability, although research has found there are some advantages such as being able to spot certain types of camouflage. Some people can see ultraviolet and it’s also been suggested others have four sets of colour receptors instead of the usual three.
Finally, each time we perceive a colour we relate it to what we’ve learned, some of it useful and some of it less so. We learn the names of seven colours of the rainbow where in reality a full spectrum of light has as many colours as you choose to name. Many of us learn that purple and violet are synonymous. Many of us leave school with the idea of red, yellow, blue and green being the four primary colours.
However much you learn, it’s not possible to recall the name of a colour in the same way that you can the name of a musical note. There is no equivalent in vision to perfect pitch. So if I were to reveal that Pantone call the block of colour on this page 16-3823 Violet Tulip, their colour of the year 2004, you might like to remember it but you could never be certain you were seeing the same colour again.
Perhaps one thing we can agree on is black as it’s something we all experience when no visible light reaches the eye. But even here there are differences. I live near Sean Kanavan, a blind guerilla gardener who plants flowers in his street. As he went blind later in life he remembers colour and always likes to hear how his hollyhocks have turned out. But to someone born blind, blackness and nothingness are quite different as Richard Gregory explains in his book Eye and Brain:
The sensation given to us by the absence of light is blackness; but to the blind it, it is nothingness. We come nearest to picturing the world of the blind, who have no brightness and no black, by thinking of the region behind our heads. We do not experience blackness behind us: we experience nothing, and this is very different from blackness.