What does the physical world around us do to our conversational lives? How do the spaces around us affect our inquisitiveness? Is our creativity hampered or helped by the three dimensional environment? These questions have been popping up regularly for me over the last couple of years. While I do not have a specific answer, let alone the answer, my last post looked at one perspective, and this second post takes a different viewpoint…

Part Two: We make of the world what we will…

titian_tiziano_vecelliCan space be more or less conducive to the content or style of our conversations? In experimenting with the effect of space on conversation, using Joslyn Art Museum as the laboratory, I found that whether seating conversational partners beneath Titian’s Giorgio Cornaro with a Falcon,placing them in a sterile corridor, or situating them outside the Museum’s restrooms had little discernible difference on the depth or vigor of their conversations.

Perhaps the mindful design or other engineered suitability of the space is irrelevant. Instead, could it be our attitude to the space that needs to adapt, not the other way around? In her book, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, Alexandra Horowitz embarks on repeated excursions of her New York City block, to discover with the aid of others how mutable our perceptions can be, and how kaleidoscopic are our surroundings, if only we attune ourselves to what is already there for us to be engaged by.

Maybe the environment is always ready for us, but we are ignorant of it. In walking a Denver downtown street with a friend of mine, Stan Bonnes, it took his observant eyes as an outsider artist to spot the false teeth wedged into the city sidewalk. If only those teeth could have talked…