peopl\ing

adding page because of this share by Dale:

The Essence of Peopling

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/04/08/the-essence-of-peopling/

Nouns for human beings – “people” or “person” – conjure in the mind a snapshot of the surface appearance of humans. Using nouns like “people” subtly encourages thinking about people as frozen in time, doing nothing in particular. “People” is an anchor for thinking about human bodies separate from their environment, from the buildings and streets and farms and parks that they build and use to go about their business.

I prefer to think about “peopling” – the process of human beings going about their business, whatever that is

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The social groups that used to provide these things have gradually faded from existence, because they are not economically viable, and because the economic, architectural, and media patterns that dominate our lives do not support them. The individual is not the appropriate unit of peopling, but it is the only unit that the tiling systems understand. If there are kinds of groups that can help us provide these valuable things for each other in our modern context, without strain or embarrassment, they probably don’t exist yet.

on finding your tribe.. as the day..

Most “cults” and “intentional communities” fail. The human institutions that will rediscover the ritual pattern languages and implement them in the context of post-industrial peopling have yet to be discovered.

matching via whimsy/curiosity.. as the day..

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A freeway is useful for getting from place to place, but it’s not a place to merely exist in the moment. So it is allowed to be ugly. More and more utilitarian, interstitial places are excused from beauty – parking lots, shopping areas, waiting rooms, hallways, and eventually even the rooms we live in. A utilitarian “housing unit” is a box for storing people; it doesn’t have to be beautiful, just cheap. And ugliness causes us to turn inward

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More and more moments are interstitial, in between the allegedly “real” moments of living. We don’t interact with each other, becasue we are just getting from place to place, perhaps simulating past and future moments in our imagination. And gradually these not-really-living moments can come to occupy the majority of our lives. Perhaps many of us who identify as introverts are just especially sensitive to the ugliness and awkwardness of modern built and social environments. We might be very happy with a quiet, pleasant, constant flow of positive social information (especially if plenty of privacy were still available.

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There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me.

Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can life well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.

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If there is such a thing as a universal criterion for “the good life,” a comfort we would all aspire to, then it must be the sense of social proximity. It must be the sense of being acknowledged and recognized, of being included and intimate with others, no matter what. It is being safe, the ultimate prize and the ultimate refuge.

invited to exist…1 of 2 needs/desires.. deep enough

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above by sarah… on ribbon farm site

sarah on twitter:

https://twitter.com/sarahdoingthing

from ribbon farm site:

Experiments in refactored perceptions is a geek joke. It refers to changing how you see the world by trying to rewire the software inside your head through writing.

Instead of having each other in mind, each participant has something else in mind – a script, or an image of the bureaucratic organization.

Almost all regulation leads to more interactions being scripted in this sense – less fit for peopling.

Even aesthetic domains have become top-down and mediated. Music is downloaded ..Dance is for professional celebrities ..Sports are for professional athletes a..

In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander argues that what he calls “pattern languages” are the basis for creating and maintaining the physical, architectural forms in which we people. The loss of the shared languages, through the expansion of top-down tiling systems, is the reason that our built environments are less and less suitable for peopling.

So, it is inevitable that as the work of building passes into the hands of specialists, the patterns which they use become more and more banal, more willful, and less anchored in reality.

The Timeless Way of Building, p. 236

When the languages break down, and our built environments and social contexts no longer make sense, the response is usually to try to exert ever more control from the top down: to control larger chunks of the environment, to control more parts of the environment, and to control behavior directly through regulation. All of these fail, because in all human systems, not just economies, ..

top-down control cannot replace the rich complexity generated by peopling

..with a shared language. Exerting more top-down control is exactly the wrong response.