After coming back to Taiwan, I have found myself amazed by tons of information on the ground. They take shape in a variety of forms everywhere, everyday. I think i have to start taking notes and share them with you or i will just watch them going through my fingers without any footprint.
The first thing i wanna share is an intersting issue of "business weekly" published in Taiwan. While waiting in a bank,I noticed that cover story, "street wisdom."
"Isn't that something similar to what we wanna learn from the everyday life?" I was very much intrigued by how a notion as such will be discussed in a business journal. Interestingly, there are some reports focusing on how several successful business men established their know how from practices on the forefront instead of taught knowledge from business schools. Most important of all, it's a kind of tacit intelligence that is not easily shared and transferred. For example, how to make your baked goods more delicious than others by different hand efforts? How to manage social relations within a team in your office? I cannot but recall how Dr. Bob (my chair, also on Sahera and Ozge's committee) use riding bicycle as an example to talk about what we know is always larger than what we can make explicit.
However, as part of academia, we do our best despite impossibility to make it exaughstively explicit. However, i also feel more relaxed since we are then not the one who is supposed to "create" intelligence. Instead, we only need to have the willingness to approach them on the street, in everyday life.
The report also mention a scholar in human cognition, Robert J. Sternberg(an American psychologist and now the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University). He suggests three kinds of intelligences in human cognition:
-Analytical intelligence is the ability to analyze and evaluate ideas, solve problems and make decisions.
-Creative intelligence involves going beyond what is given to generate novel and interesting ideas.
-Practical intelligence is the ability that individuals use to find the best fit between themselves and the demands of the environment.
See more here.
i think Sternberg is largely echoing de Certeau's idea. I found this very interesting even though it is coming from a very different field. I believe this is a trend that we need to pay attention to.
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2 comments:
As mentioned in my email. I think your observation is inline with what has been mentioned in Chase, J., Crawford, M., & Kaliski, J. (2008). Everyday urbanism. New York: Monacelli Press, the part on improvisation in Oakland. I think we need to emphasize the importance of the everyday-ness in our approaches. " Responding to the various voices and needs of the community, a designed can, using improvisational methods, transform the midblock park from unused oddity to neighborhood amenity. When applied to urban design and planning, improvisation- in its generic meaning, creating, fabricating, and composing using what is in hand - is a method of reshaping a particular environment based on preexisting local resources, inspiration, and opportunities." p. 156 of the mentioned reference.
More later...
Great!
Thanks for making this link to the Oakland case in that book. "Improvisation"in that sense is not only engaging creativity in everydayness but also contributing to existing flow of life, which is socially and ecologically sustainable in my opinion.
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