“ Making a presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity. The use of corrupt manipulations and blatant rhetorical ploys in a report or presentation — outright lying, flagwaving, personal attacks, setting up phony alternatives, misdirection, jargon-mongering, evading key issues, feigning disinterested objectivity, willful misunderstanding of other points of view — suggests that the presenter lacks both credibility and evidence. To maintain standards of quality, relevance, and integrity for evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell. Thus consuming a presentation is also an intellectual and moral activity.
— Edward Tufte - Beautiful Evidence (2006: Graphics Press)
“ In short, self absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection — or compassionate action.
— Daniel Goleman — Social Intelligence (2006: Bantam Books)
“ Such works [of architecture] emphasise the truth of the ancient maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity. Just as we cannot appreciate the attractions of safety without a background impression of danger, so, too, it is only in a building which flirts with confusion that we can apprehend the scale of our debt to our ordering capacities.
— Alain de Botton - The Architecture of Happiness (2006: McClelland & Stewart)
“ A network is not, per se, a community. A community embodies trust and social capital that develop through time as a result of embodied interaction between people. The Internet complements communities — it does not create them. Connections between people can be enabled by technology, but trust is dependent upon the passage of time and the contiguity of bodies.
— John Thackara - In the Bubble (2006: MIT Press)
“ As we suffuse the world with complex technical systems — on top of the natural and social systems already here — old-style top-down outside-in design simply won’t work. The days of the celebrity solo designer are over. Complex systems are shaped by all the people who use them, and in this new era of collaborative innovation, designers are having to evolve from being the individual authors of objects, or buildings, to being the facilitators of change among large groups of people.
Sensitivity to context, to relationships, and to consequences are key aspects of the transition from mindless development to design mindfulness.
— John Thackara, In The Bubble, (MIT Press: 2006)
