I've been thinking about this for so long.
Suspension of disbelief excites me. what amazes me really is that it seems to be an innate need in us. Nobody actually needs to teach us about it. My earliest memories revolve around playing ghar ghar. Me and my cousins would assume roles and enact the roles for hours. We would unknowingly stretch the situations we enjoyed, and compress the time of the actions we thought didn't added to the 'story' .. like sleep. A whole night was enacted in 2 minutes. ( perhaps an elementary translation of sleep-time: the time taken to sleep + the time taken to wake up!! - the in between time was non-time!) In just 2 hours we would easily create the routine of 3 or 4 days! We would willingly take anything lying around and imagine it was something that looked similar enough...
Years and years later I'm studying design methods. And it feels like I'm relearning all THAT. we need to re-learn storytelling, re-creating scenarios, and do prototype testing using 'similar objects'.
Its a game of adult Ghar Ghar!
3 comments:
JM Coetzee in his book Diary of a Bad Year talks of another thing that isn't spatial, but, like storytelling, has a time dimension: music! That means it's also very old. So it must resonate with our earlier programming in a way that modern forms of displaying information does not...
Nice elephant! Wasn't it once a computer? And its trunk an inkjet printer?
Hey! I just noticed a grammatical mistake in my comment! Should have been 'do not', not 'does not'.
That is living proof that Chomsky is wrong: we do NOT plan all our sentences beforehand such that all verbs are intrinsically connected to their subjects. We just take care that they look as though they are. In reality we string sentences together chunk by chunk, and smoothen the joints.
But the truth comes out when we are tired, and not paying attention!
I once suggested this to Chomsky, but he batted the idea aside...
God! You hit the nail on the head! It's like Shakespeare's "All the worlds' a stage"
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